Reality, one bite at a time

NSG ends India's 'clean' waiver

2011-06-25T16:56:00.001+05:30

New guidelines bar ‘sensitive' nuclear exports to countries outside the NPT ...

25 June 2011
The Hindu

NSG ends India's 'clean' waiver

Siddharth Varadarajan

New Delhi: The Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) on Friday adopted new guidelines on the transfer of sensitive nuclear technology that will effectively nullify the “clean” waiver India received from the cartel in 2008 as far as the import of enrichment and reprocessing equipment and technology (ENR) is concerned.

The decision was announced from Noordwijk, the Netherlands, where the 46-nation grouping held its 2011 plenary meeting. The NSG “agreed to strengthen its guidelines on the transfer of sensitive enrichment and reprocessing technologies,” a formal statement blandly noted.

Though the guidelines have not been made public yet, the draft text makes it clear that the group will exclude countries which are not signatories to the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty and which do not have a full-scope safeguards agreement allowing international inspections of all their nuclear facilities.

Prior to this, the NSG had a catch-all requirement of full-scope safeguards — in paragraph 4 of its guidelines — for the supply of any nuclear equipment or material.

The only additional requirement for ENR exports — as contained in paragraphs 6 and 7 of the guidelines — was that the suppliers were asked to “exercise restraint” and to ensure that any supplied equipment or technology not be used to enrich uranium beyond 20 per cent.

The NSG's September 6, 2008 ‘Statement on Civil Nuclear Cooperation with India' waived the full-scope safeguards requirement of paragraph 4 and expressly allowed ENR exports, subject to paragraphs 6 and 7. In adopting its waiver, the NSG said it was acting “based on the commitments and actions” on non-proliferation undertaken by India.

But on Friday, the cartel tore up that bargain, adopting a new paragraph 6 specifying objective and subjective criteria a recipient country must meet before an NSG member can sell ENR to it. The very first of these is NPT membership.

Since all nuclear exports to the only other countries outside the NPT – Israel, Pakistan and North Korea – are already prohibited by paragraph 4, this provision in the guidelines was expressly designed to target India, to which the restrictions of that paragraph no longer apply.

When the U.S. first floated the guidelines in November 2008, Indian officials privately complained that the NPT provision would amount to a “rollback” of both the NSG waiver and the fundamental American commitment to ensure “full civil nuclear cooperation” with India.

Confidential U.S. embassy cables published by The Hindu last week quoted Shivshankar Menon, now National Security Adviser, and Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao protesting the draft ENR rules.

Last week, a senior Indian official told journalists that the government “has deep reservations about any move by the NSG that prevents the transfer of these technologies ... that will dilute the ... exemption that was given in 2008.”

Ironically, the U.S. insists that its support for the ban on ENR sales to India “in no way detract(s) from the exception granted to India by NSG members in 2008.” The reality is that an entire category of nuclear items which NSG members were allowed to sell to India as a result of the 2008 exception can no longer be supplied.

“Before voluntarily placing our civilian facilities under IAEA safeguards,” Prime Minister Manmohan Singh assured Parliament on August 17, 2006, “we will ensure that all restrictions on India have been lifted.” What he didn't bargain for was that some restrictions, once lifted, might be imposed again.

Government cold to CAG's quest for new powers

2011-06-24T16:42:00.001+05:30

For the past two years, the CAG has been pushing the Finance Ministry — its nodal ministry — for crucial changes in the 1971 Audit Act. To no avail ...

24 June 2011
The Hindu

Government cold to CAG's quest for new powers

Siddharth Varadarajan

New Delhi: The United Progressive Alliance government may have shown a willingness to draft a new Lokpal Bill, but it is dragging its feet on a proposal to strengthen the public institution that has done so much to expose wrongdoings in public life: the Comptroller and Auditor-General (CAG).

For the past two years, the CAG has been pushing the Finance Ministry — its nodal ministry — for crucial changes in the 1971 Audit Act. The accounting watchdog's concern is that its mandate to summon files and examine the way public monies are spent has not kept pace with new modes of governance that have emerged, especially since liberalisation.

Weekly reminders

In 2010, the CAG sent concrete proposals for amendments to three broad areas, but the government is still mulling over its response. This, despite getting formal reminders on an almost weekly basis.

The official silence is not surprising given that audit reports have become something of a political hot potato. The capital was rife with reports of corruption in the telecom sector, for example, but it was only when the CAG report on the 2G spectrum allocation confirmed the scam that the government was forced to act. The latest audit report to set off a political firestorm is on oil and gas production sharing contracts, with the CAG's leaked draft saying Reliance Industries was shown “undue favours” in its KG basin operations.

The KG report is still being finalised, but its long-gestation period — work began in 2006 — and tentative conclusions reflect the weakness of the audit mandate. The Petroleum Ministry dragged its feet in giving documents (despite having asked for the audit in the first place) and private companies refused to share relevant information. The CAG now wants this situation rectified.

The first amendment it is seeking relates to the speed with which government departments respond to audit requests. Crucial audits get delayed because ministries aren't obliged to respond within a specified time frame. Just as the Right to Information Act gives ordinary citizens the right to get an answer to their questions within 30 days, the CAG wants a similar deadline for official responses to its queries.

The second change pertains to the mandatory disclosure of finalised audit reports. Governments delay the tabling of reports which are politically inconvenient. The CAG's audit of the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation was not tabled in Parliament for a year. And the Maharashtra government held on to a report for 18 months because it contained adverse comments on Vilasrao Deshmukh, tabling it only when the CAG threatened to have it released through the Governor.

With these examples fresh in its mind, the CAG wants the law to specify that governments must immediately table reports submitted while the legislature is in session, or within the first week of the next session, if submitted in between.

Finally, the CAG wants the 1971 Act to clarify its powers to audit new forms of government economic activity such as public-private partnerships and joint ventures, and new conduits of expenditure not envisaged when the law was first framed — such as the routing of money for the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, the National Rural Health Mission and the MNREGA through panchayati raj institutions and non-governmental organisations.

By some estimates, more than Rs. 80,000 crore is spent this way every year, beyond the reach of the CAG's regular audits. Because the CAG doesn't audit this expenditure, Parliament too does not get to review how well this money is being utilised.

A bill to settle a terrible debt

2011-06-22T21:01:00.006+05:30

For decades, the victims of communal and targeted violence have been denied protections of law that the rest of us take for granted. It's time to end this injustice...

22 June 2011
The Hindu

A bill to settle a terrible debt

Siddharth Varadarajan

In a vibrant and mature democracy, there would be no need to have special laws to prosecute the powerful or protect the weak. If a crime takes place, the law would simply take its course. In a country like ours, however, life is not so simple. Terrible crimes can be committed involving the murder of hundreds and even thousands of people, or the loot of billions of rupees. But the law in India does not take its course. More often than not, it stands still.

If the Lokpal bill represents an effort to get the law to change its course on the crime of corruption, the new draft bill on the prevention of communal and targeted violence is a modest contribution towards ensuring that India's citizens enjoy the protection of the state regardless of their religion, language or caste.

The draft law framed by the National Advisory Council and released earlier this month for comment and feedback is a huge improvement over the bill originally drawn up by the United Progressive Alliance government in 2005. The earlier version paid lip service to the need for a law to tackle communal violence but made matters worse by giving the authorities greater coercive powers instead of finding ways to eliminate the institutional bias against the minorities, Dalits and adivasis, which lies at the heart of all targeted violence in India.

The November 1984 massacre of Sikhs provides a good illustration of how the institutionalised “riot system” works. Let us start with the victim. She is unable to get the local police to protect the lives of her family members or property. She is unable to file a proper complaint in a police station. Senior police officers, bureaucrats and Ministers, who by now are getting reports from all across the city, State and country, do not act immediately to ensure the targeted minorities are protected. Incendiary language against the victims is freely used. Women who are raped or sexually assaulted get no sympathy or assistance. When the riot victims form makeshift relief camps, the authorities harass them and try to make them leave. The victims have to struggle for years before the authorities finally provide some compensation for the death, injury and destruction they have suffered. As for the perpetrators of the violence, they get away since the police and the government do not gather evidence, conduct no investigation and appoint biased prosecutors, thereby sabotaging the chances of conviction and punishment.

With some modifications here and there, this is the same sickening script which played out in Gujarat in 2002, when Muslims were the targeted group. On a smaller scale, all victims of organised, targeted violence — be they Tamils in Karnataka or Hindi speakers in Maharashtra or Dalits in Haryana and other parts of the country — know from experience and instinct that they cannot automatically count on the local police coming to their help should they be attacked.

If one were to abstract the single most important stylised fact from the Indian “riot system”, it is this: violence occurs and is not immediately controlled because policemen and local administrators refuse to do their duty. It is also evident that they do so because the victims belong to a minority group, precisely the kind of situation the Constituent Assembly had in mind when it wrote Article 15(1) of the Constitution: “The State shall not discriminate against any citizen on grounds only of religion, race, caste, sex, place of birth or any of them”.

How are policemen and officials able to get away with violating the Constitution in this manner? Because they know that neither the law nor their superiors will act against them. What we need, thus, is not so much a new law defining new crimes (although that would be useful too) but a law to ensure that the police and bureaucrats and their political masters follow the existing law of the land. In other words, we need a law that punishes them for discriminating against citizens who happen to be minorities. This is what the draft Prevention of Communal and Targeted Violence (Access to Justice and Reparations) Bill, 2011 does. [PDF]

The CTV bill sets out to protect religious and linguistic minorities in any State in India, as well as the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes, from targeted violence, including organised violence. Apart from including the usual Indian Penal Code offences, the NAC draft modernises the definition of sexual assault to cover crimes other than rape and elaborates on the crime of hate propaganda already covered by Section 153A of the IPC. Most importantly, it broadens the definition of dereliction of duty — which is already a crime — and, for the first time in India, adds offences by public servants or other superiors for breach of command responsibility. “Where it is shown that continuous widespread or systematic unlawful activity has occurred,” the draft says, “it can be reasonably presumed that the superior in command of the public servant whose duty it was to prevent the commission of communal and targeted violence, failed to exercise supervision … and shall be guilty of the offence of breach of command responsibility.” With 10 years imprisonment prescribed for this offence, superiors will hopefully be deterred from allowing a Delhi 1984 or Gujarat 2002 to happen on their watch.

Another important feature is the dilution of the standard requirement that officials can only be prosecuted with the prior sanction of the government. The CTV bill says no sanction will be required to prosecute officials charged with offences which broadly fall under the category of dereliction of duty. For other offences, sanction to prosecute must be given or denied within 30 days, failing which it is deemed to have been given. Although the bill says the reasons for denial of sanction must be recorded in writing, it should also explicitly say that this denial is open to judicial review.

Another lacuna the bill fills is on compensation for those affected by communal and targeted violence. Today, the relief that victims get is decided by the government on an ad hoc and sometimes discriminatory basis. Section 90 and 102 of the CTV bill rectify this by prescribing an equal entitlement to relief, reparation, restitution and compensation for all persons who suffer physical, mental, psychological or monetary harm as a result of the violence, regardless of whether they belong to a minority group or not. While a review of existing state practice suggests victims who belong to a religious or linguistic ‘majority' group in a given state do not require special legal crutches to get the police or administration to register and act on their complaints, the CTV bill correctly recognises that they are entitled to the same enhanced and prompt relief as minority victims. The language of these Sections could, however, be strengthened to bring this aspect out more strongly.

The CTV bill also envisages the creation of a National Authority for Communal Harmony, Justice and Reparation. The authority's role will be to serve as a catalyst for implementation of the new law. Its functions will include receiving and investigating complaints of violence and dereliction of duty, and monitoring the build up of an atmosphere likely to lead to violence. It cannot compel a State government to take action — in deference to the federal nature of law enforcement — but can approach the courts for directions to be given. There will also be State-level authorities, staffed, like the National Authority, by a process the ruling party cannot rig. The monitoring of relief and rehabilitation of victims will be a major part of their responsibilities.

On the negative side of the ledger, the NAC draft makes an unnecessary reference to the power of the Centre and to Article 355 of the Constitution. The aim, presumably, is to remind the Centre of its duties in the event of a State government failing to act against incidents of organised communal or targeted violence. But the Centre already has the statutory right to intervene in such situations; if it doesn't, the reasons are political rather than legal. The draft also unnecessarily complicates the definition of communal and targeted violence by saying the acts concerned must not only be targeted against a person by virtue of his or her membership of any group but must also “destroy the secular fabric of the nation.” Like the reference to Art. 355, this additional requirement can safely be deleted without diluting what is otherwise a sound law.

The BJP and others who have attacked the bill by raising the bogey of “minority appeasement” have got it completely wrong again. This is a law which does away with the appeasement of corrupt, dishonest and rotten policemen and which ends the discrimination to which India's religious and linguistic minorities are routinely subjected during incidents of targeted violence. The BJP never tires of talking about what happened to the Sikhs in 1984 when the Congress was in power. Now that a law has finally been framed to make that kind of mass violence more difficult, it must not muddy the water by asking why it covers “only” the minorities. In any case, the Bill's definition covers Hindus as Hindus in States where they are in a minority (such as Jammu and Kashmir, Punjab and Nagaland), as linguistic minorities in virtually every State, and as SCs and STs. More importantly, persons from majority communities who suffer in the course of communal and targeted incidents will be entitled to the same relief as minority victims. If someone feels there is any ambiguity about this, the bill's language can easily be strengthened to clarify this.

At the end of the day, however, we need to be clear about one thing: India needs a law to protect its most vulnerable citizens from mass violence, its minorities. This is a duty no civilised society can wash its hands of.

A weakness born of bad intent

2011-06-07T21:40:00.000+05:30

The UPA government's unwillingness to act against the abuse of political and corporate power has created a vacuum which others are rushing to fill...

7 June 2011
The Hindu

A weakness born of bad intent

Siddharth Varadarajan

Like millions of others across India, I have spent the past week repelled by the spectacle of a weak government entering into improbable contortions over the naive and somewhat bizarre demands of Baba Ramdev. And when the “toughness” followed in the early hours of Sunday, it came in a typically cowardly fashion — with police action in the dead of the night against unarmed supporters who did not pose an immediate or even potential threat to law and order in Delhi. Kapil Sibal, the government's chief negotiator, said permission to assemble at the Ram Lila grounds had been granted for yoga exercises and not politics. But people in India have the right to assemble peacefully and to put forward political demands if they so wish. If tomorrow, the organisers of a classical music concert in Nehru Park put up a banner demanding a strong Lokpal Bill, will it be OK for the police to wade in?

The fact that the Manmohan Singh government swung from abject capitulation to unnecessary confrontation in less than 48 hours does not surprise me. Its credibility on the issue of corruption is at an all time low. The pressure it is under has blunted its political instincts. However, sending four senior ministers to the airport to welcome the yoga instructor-turned-upstart politician and then hundreds of policemen to extern him were both acts of gutlessness which the Congress party will find hard to live down. Particularly when the Baba was not even serious about the issue of black money.

Everybody with any sense agrees that corruption is a serious issue and that all efforts must be made to end the curse of black money. But it is meaningless and even nonsensical to demand the framing of a new law to confiscate black money when we do not know where this money is, how much it consists of and who it belongs to. If the authorities had this information, they would be legally empowered to seize the funds and place their owners behind bars. But the passage of a new law will not make the gathering of this information any easier. Either the Baba is not a very serious person or he has allowed emotion and his broader political ambitions to cloud his judgment. Which is surely not a good thing for someone well versed in yoga.

The problem of corruption is not simply one of law but of will. The hold of black money over the economic and political system of India cannot be ended so long as the government lacks the political will to actually crack down on the printing press which generates it: corruption. Defined broadly as the abuse of political and corporate power for personal gain, corruption is the glue which binds this country's political and economic elite at every level of governance from the block and district up to the Union. Corruption is not an abstraction. Every crore that a politician or bureaucrat may have secreted away as “black money” in Switzerland or elsewhere is organically linked to the tens of crores of rupees in both “black” and “white” money outside and inside India that businessmen generate by getting favourable treatment. Corruption was an integral part of the “license-permit raj” of Nehruvian socialism. But it has grown to frightening proportions in our liberalised free market economy. Politics and business have come so close together today that it is sometimes hard to tell the two apart.

Any serious campaign against corruption by civil society or politicians, Babas or babalog must zero in on the system which generates illegal gains for those with power, influence and money. Such a campaign must demand that action be taken against those individuals who have abused their authority or sought to subvert laws and procedures for personal gain. But Ramdev's campaign was not about this at all. Which was why the government was also quite happy to engage with him in what it knew would be a meaningless exercise.

While there is always room for legislative clarity in the definition of offences, the implementation of any new law will remain a prisoner to this lack of political will unless it allows for independent investigation and prosecution. A strong Lokpal Bill may help remedy the situation somewhat but only if the ability of the government to interfere with the investigation or punishment of well-connected individuals is ended. Here, it is instructive to see what happened in a recent case decided by the Lokayukta for the Delhi government, Justice Manmohan Sarin.

In the same week that the UPA government agreed to discuss the entire system of taxation, finance, administration and education in the country with Baba Ramdev, its stiffness of resolve in protecting a junior politician accused by the Lokayukta of abusing his authority seems to have passed almost unnoticed.

The case concerned a Delhi minister, Raj Kumar Chauhan, who sought to interfere with the tax inspectors even as they were conducting a raid at the premises of a private establishment. A complaint against the minister was filed by a senior IAS officer, Jalaj Shrivastava, who was a tax commissioner at the time. After conducting an inquiry, which included collecting testimony on oath from the officers concerned, Justice Sarin found that the minister had indeed abused his authority on behalf of a private party. But his recommendation that Mr. Chauhan be sacked and proceeded against was rejected by the President of India on the advice of the Union Ministry of Home Affairs. Evidently, the MHA found Mr. Chauhan's explanation — that the telephone call he placed during the raid was nothing other than the routine expression of concern for a constituent — to be more credible than the exertions of the Lokayukta or of the upright bureaucrats who put their future career prospects on the line by becoming whistle-blowers.

The protection afforded to the Delhi minister, who is fairly low down in the Congress party's food chain, shows the extent to which the “system” is programmed to circle its wagons at the first sign of trouble. Even if one dismisses this example because the Lokayukta is still a young institution, what explains the continuation of Vilasrao Deshmukh in the Union Cabinet despite the Supreme Court holding him guilty of abusing his authority when he was Chief Minister of Maharashtra? Mr. Deshmukh had intervened on behalf of a usurious moneylender against whom some peasants wished to file a police complaint. Instructions to go easy were phoned in to the police station concerned, which diligently made a record of the call in its daily log book. A system that is keen to stamp out the abuse of authority — which lies at the root of all corruption — would ask Mr. Deshmukh to leave the Cabinet now that his culpability has been confirmed by the highest court. But, alas, the UPA does not run such a system. Mr. Deshmukh got promoted to a more powerful ministry. And instructions have been sent out to all police stations in Maharashtra that they should no longer make a record of every phone call they receive from ministers.

If Baba Ramdev were really serious about fighting corruption, he would have hit the UPA hard at the places it was most vulnerable instead of trying to build his own political constituency through shadow boxing against imaginary foes like the Cayman Islands and the 1000 rupee note. As for the Bharatiya Janata Party and RSS, which have tried to fire from the Baba's shoulder, the less said the better. Why is it that L.K. Advani, who was the second most powerful man in India for six years from 1998 to 2004, woke up to the problem of black money only after his government was voted out of power? If there is a lesson from the farce that has been enacted in Delhi this past week, it is this: there is no room for abstraction. Instead of demanding the “return of black money,” let us ask the government why it has not signed an agreement with Switzerland of the kind the European Union has for the repatriation of taxes that the Swiss levy on interest earned by foreign account holders. Instead of the death penalty for the “corrupt,” let us ask why the Prime Minister is so slow to act against ministers who abuse their authority. Let us push for a strong and empowered Lokpal whose recommendations cannot be thrown into the dustbin.

Dateline Dar: Tanzania, India find 'South-South' ties in good health

2011-05-28T21:46:00.000+05:30

Tanzania was the second stop in Manmohan Singh's first proper visit to Africa in seven years. My diary of a brief but memorable visit ...

28 May 2011
The Hindu

DAR ES SALAAM DIARY
Tanzania, India find 'South-South' ties in good health

Siddharth Varadarajan

Dar es Salaam: Indian officials have spent the past week fighting off Western suggestions that they are in a race for influence in Africa with the Chinese. On Friday, their claim that India and China complement one another was endorsed by President Jakaya Kikwete of Tanzania, who gave a concrete and unscripted example of how the specific skill sets the two Asian powers possess has worked to the advantage of his people.

Speaking to reporters at a joint press conference with the Indian Prime Minister on Friday, Mr. Kikwete said that Tanzania lacked the capacity to provide a whole range of treatments at home, including heart surgery and care for cancer and renal diseases. A few years ago, his government sent 29 doctors and nurses to India for specialised cardiac training and now they have returned and are performing open-heart surgeries in the country for the first time. The Chinese have pitched in with an offer to help build a 200-bed hospital. “So the Indians have helped to train our people and Chinese have helped to build the hospital where they will work”, Mr. Kikwete said.

From Apollo to space

Tanzanians spend nearly $80 million every year on medical treatment abroad, including in India, so when the Apollo Hospitals group from India announced its intention of setting up a specialty hospital here, the Tanzanian government jumped at the chance. The $150 million project will be a joint venture between Apollo, the Tanzanian Health Ministry and its National Social Security Fund, with the Tanzanians providing the land and building, and the Indian side the equipment and doctors. An MOU was signed by Apollo chairman Prathap C. Reddy in the presence of Dr. Manmohan Singh and Mr. Kikwete.

Apollo’s plan is to develop their Dar es Salaam hospital as a hub-and-spoke model with smaller clinics in 14 countries across the eastern African region. Though the details of the project have yet to be worked out — including Apollo’s social obligations — President Kikwete said there would also be a training component so that Tanzania’s long-term health-care capacity gets augmented.

Speaking later at a function to inaugurate the India-Tanzania Centre of Excellence in Information and Communication Technology at the Dar es Salaam Institute of Technology, Dr. Singh spoke about taking this capacity-building to the stratosphere: “I would specially like to announce our readiness to cooperate with Tanzania in the area of space technology and applications”, he said. Though he probably had satellites in mind, India should consider offering to eventually send the first African into space as part of its own manned mission project. Such an offer would fire the imagination of a continent that India regards as an emerging economic — and strategic — pole of the international system.

After Ujamaa

When Indira Gandhi came to Dar es Salaam in 1974, she gifted Mwalimu Julius Nyerere a peacock and peahen from India. There are today 14 peacock nests around the State House. The last time Dr. Singh came to Tanzania was in the late 1980s, when he was secretary-general of the South Commission, an independent body set up by the Nonaligned Movement with Nyerere as its chairman. Their exertions were, unfortunately, not as productive as that of Mrs. Gandhi’s poultry. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the advent of neoliberalism undermined this unique project of the Global South even before it got off the ground. Tanzania abandoned Ujamaa, its system of socialism, and India embraced liberalisation.

Twenty years later, however, even under the new economic paradigm the two countries have embraced, the need for South-South cooperation is being felt more than ever before. The only difference now is that the process is being driven as much by private capital as by the state, though often the two are in close partnership. Apollo officials told The Hindu that once their hospital project’s details are settled, they may consider approaching the Indian government for access to a part of the $5 billion line of credit which has been set up for Africa. Tanzania is also keen to promote investment in its agricultural sector. Millions of hectares are available for long-term lease and contracts have been signed with European and Saudi firms. But unlike in Ethiopia, these lands are not always vacant. Which is why the Indian High Commission has not encouraged Indian companies to get into farming here.

The city of peace

Wrapped around a natural harbour that is deep enough to allow massive container ships to gently sail at shouting distance from its colonial-era government quarter, Dar es Salaam is an attractive city that has all the charm of a bustling port without the menace and chaos one normally associates with cities like Mumbai and Karachi across the Indian Ocean. Traffic jams are a major problem — the bureau chief of the East African newspaper said he would rather leave for work at 6 a.m. than put up with a three hour commute. Amazingly, however, road discipline appears to be maintained at all times, even when cars are backed up for miles on undivided roads and the oncoming lanes are empty.

The 1990 report of the South Commission noted that because "the South doesn’t know the South … we have been compelled to commit our own errors, unable neither to learn from the experience of the others in similar situations nor to benefit from other’s positive experiences". Mr. Kekwete said he looked to India for technology and investment. Manmohan Singh graciously added that as Tanzania developed, he hoped Tanzanian companies might also come and invest in India. However, one thing Tanzania could offer to teach Indians right away is traffic sense.

Dateline Addis: Manmohan invokes flour, power in pitch to Ethiopia

2011-05-27T21:53:00.003+05:30

Clearly one up on India in terms of the facilities for simultaneous translation it provides to MPs; Ethiopia has over 80 languages. My diary from Addis Ababa ...

27 May 2011
The Hindu

ADDIS ABABA DIARY
Manmohan invokes flour and power in pitch to Ethiopia

Siddharth Varadarajan

The deadpan delivery was vintage Manmohan but the Prime Minister's speech to a joint sitting of Ethiopia's parliament on Thursday appeared to come straight from the heart. He spoke of India and the Horn of Africa once being part of the same landmass – paleogeographers call it Gondwanaland. He mentioned the Siddi community on the west coast of India who are of Ethiopian descent. And he cited “often overlooked similarities” in tradition and culture, including the use of fermented flour for making dosa in south India and injera in Ethiopia, to argue that connections between the two countries were deep despite being separated by the waters of the Indian Ocean.

The Prime Minister invoked history too, quoting Nehru's stirring call for solidarity with Abyssinia when Mussolini invaded the only African country never to be colonized. We in India can do nothing to help our brethren in distress in Ethiopia for we are also victims of imperialism, Nehru wrote in 1935, but we stand with them today in their sorrow as we hope to stand together when better days come. “I believe the better days that [he] spoke of have come,” Dr. Singh declared to applause from the assembled parliamentarians.

Ethiopia has since overcome many adversities, he said, and India too was in a position to make a difference. After reiterating India's economic commitments to the country, the Prime Minister turned to the realities of international power politics. India and Ethiopia were plural, diverse societies and both believed democracy and “respect for the free will of the people” were the only ways to solve their problems. “Similar principles should be applied in the conduct of international governance,” he added. In a veiled attack on Nato's bombing of Libya, he said the people of West Asia and North Africa have the right to determine their own destiny but that any international action “must be based on the rule of law and be strictly within the framework of United Nations resolutions.”

Though the Speaker of Ethiopia's House of Federation said Ethiopia was an emerging democracy and would like to learn from India's system, its Parliament is clearly one up on India in terms of the facilities for simultaneous translation it provides to MPs. As with all debates and meetings, Dr. Singh's speech was simultaneously translated into five languages: Amharic, Tigrinya, Oromiffa, Afar and Somalinya. Ethiopia has more than 80 languages and any MP who wants translations in her or his own language is entitled to it at Parliament's expense, a Parliamentary official told The Hindu. In contrast, the Indian Parliament has provision only for simultaneous translation between English and Hindi. MPs who wish to speak in any of the other Scheduled languages have to give advanced notice so that their speech can be translated for the other MPs.

A river runs through it

If India, which has several rivers running through it other than the Brahmaputra, is jittery about China's plans to build a dam on the Yarlung Zangbo's upper reaches, imagine the fear that Ethiopia's decision to dam the Nile must be causing in Egypt, whose entire civilisation and economy has depended on the uninterrupted flow of Africa's longest river. The Blue Nile originates in Lake Tana inside Ethiopia before entering Sudan and joining the White Nile at Khartoum for its final journey through northern Sudan and Egypt up to the Mediterranean Sea.

The Ethiopian government plans to build the Renaissance Dam some 40 km. from its border with Sudan. The project will store more than 60 billion cubic metres of water and generate 5250 MW of electricity, more than half of which Ethiopia intends to sell to Sudan and Egypt. In an effort to allay the fears of the lower riparians, the Ethiopians insist they will not use the water stored for irrigation. They also say the dam will help generate a more predictable flow in the Blue Nile, which is mainly responsible for variations in the main Nile. When the dam's plans were first announced, there were howls of protest from the erstwhile government of Hosni Mubarak. But since Tahrir Square, the new transitional dispensation in Cairo has adopted a more cooperative approach. Asked about the dam in his joint press conference with Dr. Singh, Prime Minister Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia said his government had offered to subject the dam's design to scrutiny by Egyptian, Sudanese and international experts and that he hoped this transparency would end the controversy about the Renaissance dam once and for all.

A coffee a day

A handsome city spread out over gently rolling hills at an average elevation of 9000 feet above sea level, Addis Ababa is a bustling metropolis that has become the diplomatic capital of the continent thanks to the headquarters of the African Union being located here. The Chinese government is erecting a spectacular new building for the AU but the signs of construction visible in virtually every part of the city are testimony to the fact that Ethiopia is one of Africa's fastest growing economies. The temperature rarely rises above the mid-20s and when it does, a shower promptly cools the city. The only drawback is the pollution. Many of the cars and buses on the streets are second hand imports that are well past their prime. Though lacking the Italianate art deco architecture of Asmara, Addis Ababa has benefited from its brief encounter with European imperialism in one tangible way: a superb espresso, pulled from ageing Italian machines, can be had on virtually every street for the equivalent of about 25 US cents.

In Manmohan's visit, a new emphasis on Africa

2011-05-23T21:14:00.001+05:30

Six-day visit to Addis Ababa and Dar es Salaam sets the stage for a big diplomatic push into the continent ...

23 May 2011
The Hindu

In Manmohan's visit, a new emphasis on Africa

Siddharth Varadarajan

Addis Ababa: In the eight years he has been Prime Minister of India, Manmohan Singh has roamed the far corners of the globe but touched down on the soil of Africa only three times. This week, he will add two more African entry stamps to his passport — Ethiopia and Tanzania — with his six-day visit to Addis Ababa for the Second Africa-India Forum Summit and to Dar es Salaam, setting the stage for a big diplomatic push into a continent that is of growing economic and strategic interest for India and Indian companies.

In a statement released prior to his departure for Addis Ababa on Monday, Dr. Singh said Africa is “emerging as a new growth pole of the world” and that India's partnership with the continent based on the three pillars of capacity-building and skill transfer, trade and infrastructure development was a “living embodiment of South-South cooperation.”

Here in the Ethiopian capital, India is evidently the flavour of the week with a cultural festival showcasing films like 3 Idiots and Sholay drawing capacity crowds. A large Indian business delegation — including industrialists with extensive Africa operations like Adi Godrej, Sunil Mittal and Sanjay Kirloskar — has been camping here for three days. A symposium of African and Indian editors was also held on the sidelines, with both sides undertaking to build a future media partnership.

Though many countries, including China, Japan and Turkey, have held partnership summits with Africa, the Indian initiative is the first to make it to a second iteration. One reason, perhaps, is the practicality of the forum summit, with the number of African countries limited to 15 as per the ‘Banjul formula' adopted by the African Union (AU). The AU through its own process chose the participants this time: Algeria, Burundi, Chad, Egypt, Equatorial Guinea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Libya, Malawi, Namibia, Mauritania, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa and Swaziland.

But Indian officials say any decisions and commitments — including an enhancement of existing lines of credit already totalling more than $5 billion — will be implemented across the 53-nation continent through consultation.

After the Africa-India event, Dr. Singh will have summit meetings with Prime Minister Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia and President Jakaya Kikwete of Tanzania before returning to New Delhi on May 28.

India's stake in Africa's future

2011-05-23T20:59:00.003+05:30

More than any other region, it is Africa that has to be a strategic priority for India. What we must offer is a partnership no other power is willing or able to extend to the continent...

23 May 2011
The Hindu

India's stake in Africa's future

Siddharth Varadarajan

A spectre is haunting Europe and America, home to the colonialists and cold warriors of yesterday, the spectre of an Africa — which they ruled and exploited for a century-and-a-half — now coming under the sway of rising powers like China and India.

Read any western account of the growing Chinese and Indian presence in Africa and chances are that the charge of ‘new colonialism' will figure somewhere. And if there is ‘new colonialism,' can new colonial rivalries be far behind? In this telling, not only are China and India sucking Africa dry, but the two are also said to be locked in competition with each other for access to Africa's mineral wealth and oil.

So central is the notion of an Oriental ‘Scramble for Africa' to the western mind that it is almost impossible to speak of India's presence in Africa without dragging China in as well. Consider this typical lede from a report on the forthcoming Africa-India summit in Addis Ababa, filed by the French news agency, AFP: “India will seek to expand its economic footprint in Africa, where rival China has made major inroads, at a second summit between the South Asian powerhouse and African nations this week.”

Like other spectres the West conjures up from time to time, the actual picture in Africa is not so frightening, least of all for the Africans themselves. “What they say doesn't make sense,” Oldemiro Baloi, Foreign Minister of Mozambique, told a group of Indian journalists in Maputo last month. “We did not fight for our independence just to shift from one colonial master to another. And India and China did not support our liberation struggle in order to enslave us.” The West doesn't like to be challenged but Africa has an interest in diversifying its partners, he added. “India is itself a poor country which has values based on solidarity and does not impose conditionalities or attach strings to its aid. Earlier, the western countries would complain implicitly about India and China but now they are more blunt. ‘Why is India doing this, why is China doing this?' And we say, because they are good, they are competitive.”

Though the tendency to see India and China as rivals in Africa is widespread, the fact is that the Chinese investment and trade presence are much larger. But there is another reason why the ‘rivals' frame may be deceptive: from the perspective of Africa, the two countries have core competences which may actually complement each other in many ways.

The Chinese excel in large infrastructure projects and have deep pockets while the Indians have an edge in ICT, capacity building and training and also emerging areas like agriculture and floriculture. The Indian ability to relate to Africans is also much greater, which is why non-Indian MNCs prefer to use Indians as managers for projects involving interaction with local officials and populations. The fact that India is a democracy, and a chaotic one at that, may mean Chinese companies steal a march over Indian ones. But India's democratic culture and consultative approach make it an attractive partner for African nations looking to enhance their own skills and capabilities. In other words, Africa is looking to do business with both China and India at the same time and there does seem to be more than enough room for both.

And yet, there's no reason for India to be complacent. As the African economy emerges, its politics stabilises and new opportunities arise, competition from around the world will be stiff. The world can look forward to greater supply of food, minerals and energy but Africa has the right to drive a tough bargain. India is well placed because of the unique set of capabilities it offers. At the same time, it must consciously avoid the path of exploitation other big powers before it have taken.

Thus far, India's engagement with Africa has operated at two levels. The first level is official, where the government has grafted on to the political goodwill built up over several decades some real financial heft. After pursuing regional and pan-African initiatives like the Team-9 framework for cooperation in West Africa and the e-network project, the first Africa-India summit in 2008 envisaged a line of credit worth $5.6 billion to be spent on development and capacity building projects. Least-developed African nations were to get preferential access to the Indian market and India also committed itself to establishing 19 centres of excellence and training institutions in different fields across Africa.

Side by side with this official thrust, the Indian private sector has also shown a willingness to invest billions of dollars in Africa. The Second Africa-India summit to be held in Ethiopia this week is likely to increase the pace of this engagement. There is talk of pushing bilateral trade with Africa to $70 billion by 2015, up from the current level of $46 billion. Cumulative Indian investments in Africa stood at $90 billion in 2010 and are likely to rise dramatically in the years ahead.

At the same time, there are several steps India needs to take to ensure the current momentum is maintained and even intensified.

First, India must ramp up its diplomatic presence in Africa. Indian companies and citizens will be more likely to work in countries where India maintains an embassy. And it would help if these embassies were robustly staffed by young diplomats anxious to make a mark rather than by those at the fag end of their career who see a tour of duty in Africa as a punishment posting and who have little or no interest in African culture and society.

Second, the government should consider establishing a special purpose vehicle (SPV) to pursue strategic investments and business opportunities in Africa, especially in sectors such as mining, infrastructure and agriculture. Such an SPV could harness the talent and resources that the Indian public and private sectors have to offer but which their managements are often unable to utilise in overseas projects in a timely manner for a variety of reasons.

Third, the SPV or some other official entity must pay attention to corporate social responsibility issues connected to all Indian FDI projects in Africa, especially since many of them might be in countries where domestic regulatory frameworks for workers' rights and environmental protection are inadequate or dysfunctional. As public pressure in India makes it less easy for Indian companies to cut corners at home, some of the motivation to invest in Africa might be linked to their belief that they can get away with dodgy business practices there. India has a strategic interest in ensuring that Indian companies operating abroad act responsibly and must come up with an appropriate monitoring mechanism.

Fourth, there must be a strict audit of all monies disbursed through the Lines of Credit for Africa. Two years ago, there were reports of questionable dealings in the subsidised export of rice to a number of sub-Saharan African countries. With Indian credit lines now running into several billion dollars — the eventual beneficiaries of which will be Indian companies and suppliers to whom recipient governments are obliged to buy from — there must be complete transparency in the process from start to finish.

Fifth, a greater effort should be made to build on the domain knowledge and cultural equity that the Indian diaspora across Africa has in abundance about local business conditions and customs. It is estimated that there are as many as two million people of Indian origin living in Africa. Though the bulk of the diaspora is in countries like South Africa, Kenya, Tanzania and Nigeria, Indian businessmen and even teachers and professionals can be found in virtually every African country. For a variety of reasons, these communities are not so well integrated within the political and cultural milieu of their host countries. But the more economic and cultural interaction there is between India and Africa, that could well change.

Sixth, the “commerce of ideas” that Mahatma Gandhi envisaged the future relationship between India and Africa to revolve around should be made a central element of Indian policy. The 2.2 billion people of India and Africa share many problems and could learn from each other's experiences in resolving these. Promoting partnerships between the media and academic communities might be one way to do this. Innovative work in the field of handicrafts has just started and the rich field of cultural interaction has remained practically unexplored. As much if not more than business deals and lines of credit, it is this commerce of ideas which will provide true depth to the emerging partnership between Africa and India.

Osama's killing will not affect India-Pakistan talks

2011-05-04T17:28:00.007+05:30

Despite the initial outburst of triumphalism from New Delhi over the discovery and killing of Osama bin Laden in the Pakistani cantonment town of Abbottabad, the Indian government is not going to allow the al-Qaeda leader to scuttle the dialogue process with Islamabad ...

4 May 2011
The Hindu

NEWS ANALYSIS
Osama's killing will not affect India-Pakistan talks

Siddharth Varadarajan

New Delhi: The fact that Osama bin Laden found refuge in a Pakistani cantonment town may add more rhetorical punch to India’s charge that Pakistan has become a safe haven for violent extremism but the first-order effect of his killing on the bilateral relationship is likely to be negligible.

After all, India’s recent decision to rekindle the dialogue process was taken in full knowledge of the fact that Islamabad remains unwilling or unable to act decisively against the different jihadi groups that form part of the “syndicate of terror.” These include, of course, the Lashkar-e-Taiba and its leadership, who were responsible for the November 2008 terrorist attacks on Mumbai.

For two years, the Manmohan Singh government kept the dialogue process suspended in the hope that this would help force Pakistan to act. The strategy worked at first but turned out to be a weak instrument the longer India persisted with it. Worse, the blanket refusal to talk meant India was unable to push for gains in other areas such as trade and commerce and confidence-building measures.

Even though the Prime Minister and some of his advisers understood that a change of tack was needed, they remained wary of how the Opposition and the wider body of public opinion would react. The contrived outcry which followed the abortive Sharm el-Sheikh initiative of July 2009 delayed the much-needed reset for another year. Ironically, when Dr. Singh’s government finally indicated — after the Thimphu meetings this February — that it was ready to move forward on the full spectrum of issues, there was hardly any political criticism. Perhaps the Opposition had better issues to target the Prime Minister on, like the 2G scam, or realised, in the wake of Governor Salman Taseer’s assassination, that the dysfunctionality of the Pakistani state was not necessarily India-specific. Either way, the dialogue is back and there is hardly any public controversy about this despite Pakistan not fulfilling all of India’s oft-repeated pre-conditions on 26/11 and terrorism.

This new strategy of engaging Pakistan has opened up the possibility of quick progress on ‘side’ issues like trade, even as progress on the core issues of terrorism and Kashmir is fated to remain slow, contingent as it is on the level of trust the two sides have in each other. Thus, at the recent meeting of Commerce Secretaries in Islamabad, for example, both sides announced their intention of taking steps that will ramp up two-way trade.

India is unlikely to make the mistake of allowing Osama bin Laden to sabotage this win-win process from his watery grave in the Indian Ocean. Apart from economic gains, greater trade will gradually enlarge the constituency of those in Pakistan who have a stake in the normalisation of relations with India. Even on the Kashmir front, the resumption of backchannel talks and the revival, obviously under a new name, of the ‘Manmohan-Musharraf’ formula, are something New Delhi can look forward to.

When the whole world, post-Abbottabad, is drawing its own unflattering conclusions about the Pakistani military establishment, there is no need for India to strike a triumphalist note about Pakistan being a sanctuary for terrorists. What the U.S. did on Monday may have been effective but it remains a second-best solution to tackling terror on Pakistani soil. The fight against the entire syndicate of terror has to be waged by the Pakistani police and security forces, acting under the complete control of the civilian government there. This is a message India needs to emphasise to the U.S. and other allies and friends of Pakistan and it will be most effective if delivered with tact and restraint.

A fork in the road for the U.S. in South Asia

2011-05-03T19:54:00.002+05:30

President Obama can call an end to the Fourth Afghan War and allow the Pakistani Army to fill the void, or he can shift tack and push for an end to the alliance between generals and jihadis that lies at the root of the region's terror complex.

3 May 2011
The Hindu

A fork in the road for the U.S. in South Asia

Siddharth Varadarajan

In tracking down and killing Osama bin Laden in the Pakistani town of Abbottabad on Sunday night, America finally seems to have got something right.

The terrorist attacks of 9/11 were the result of a catastrophic intelligence failure in which different American agencies failed to connect the dots. In response, the George W. Bush administration launched not one but two wars, first in Afghanistan and then Iraq, but did not manage to capture or kill the mastermind behind those attacks. The military sledgehammer produced collateral gains and losses for the U.S. — regime change in Kabul and Baghdad but thousands of body bags too, military bases in the cockpit of Asia but international opposition and even opprobrium as well, a bonanza for its arms and contractor industries but also a fiscal deficit which helped pave the way to a full blown financial crisis.

While counter-terrorism gains such as the capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed were almost all intelligence driven, the preoccupation with a military approach to the ‘AfPak' region has produced the single biggest liability for Washington: a toxic dependence on the Pakistani army. GHQ, Rawalpindi's associations and entanglements with terrorist groups ensures the “war” being fought remains unwinnable. No amount of tinkering at the margins, no Petraeus or McChrystal plan, no proposal of rehabilitation and reintegration of the Taliban, has helped the Pentagon overcome this fundamental flaw.

Patience wearing thin

Though the U.S. gave Pakistan a very long rope, signs that Washington's patience was wearing thin have been multiplying in recent months. As the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and GHQ happily played both sides of the ‘war on terror' game in pursuit of their own long-term political and strategic objectives, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was quietly distancing itself from its unreliable Pakistani counterpart. The Raymond Davies affair — in which no less a person than President Barack Obama saw fit to intervene — brought this decoupling out into the open in a particularly dramatic fashion. The Abbottabad operation is also likely a product of America going solo on Pakistani soil.

Last month, Admiral Mike Mullen openly accused the Pakistani military of collusion with the Haqqani network and other terrorists operating in Afghanistan. It is safe to assume he laid this charge in full knowledge of the fact that bin Laden was living in Abbottabad, a town north of Islamabad that is a stone's throw away from the Pakistan Military Academy in Kakul. The fact that the world's most wanted man could remain undetected in a small town crawling with soldiers and officers suggests either a high degree of dysfunctionality within the Pakistani system or, worse, a high degree of collusion. Plausible though the first option is, most Americans inside and outside the administration — not to speak of officials and lay persons the world over — will likely believe the second.

Mr. Obama was gracious enough to say in a general sort of way that America's “counterterrorism cooperation with Pakistan helped lead us to bin Laden and the compound where he was hiding” but a senior administration official who briefed reporters later on Monday was blunt about the limits of that cooperation. “We shared our intelligence on this bin Laden compound with no other country, including Pakistan,” he said.

Pakistan and Afghanistan

Where do U.S. relations with Pakistan and Afghanistan go from here? Indian officials fear there will be growing domestic political pressure on Mr. Obama to declare the ‘Fourth Afghan War' over and accelerate the drawdown of U.S. troops in the run-up to the 2012 presidential election. But just because the U.S. is waging a war against the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan is no reason for India to fear its departure. At stake is what remains to fill the void. The insurgency in Afghanistan can only be defeated by strengthening the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF), on the one hand, and expanding economic opportunities for the country's peoples, on the other. Unfortunately, the former has only recently become an American priority and even then, Washington remains unwilling to allow the ANSF to develop critical assets like an air force. As for development, it is contingent on security and stability, both of which have proved elusive.

If the Pakistani military has run with the jihadi hares even as it has hunted with American hounds, it has done so in anticipation of Washington's eventual withdrawal from Afghanistan. At the same time, this cannot be an argument for the indefinite extension of the American military presence in that country — especially when U.S. troops and aircraft have killed a large number of innocent civilians. Ten years on, it should be clear that the problems in Afghanistan do not have a military solution, at least not one the U.S. can deliver. What America can and must do, however, is to choose its friends wisely and to use its economic and political clout to ensure the Army's nexus with jihadi groups in Pakistan is weakened and destroyed. If indeed the ISI was kept in the dark about Abbottabad, this is a bad augury for the Pakistani military. But unless the U.S. is prepared to go further down that fork in the road, the terrorists who are already preparing themselves to take bin Laden's place will continue to find fertile ground inside Pakistan.

Rush in now, repent later

2011-04-25T18:56:00.000+05:30

A transparent assessment of the costs and risks associated with India's ambitious nuclear plans must be made before any ground is broken at Jaitapur or elsewhere...

25 April 2011
The Hindu

Rush in now, repent later

Siddharth Varadarajan

You really have to hand it to the nuclear industry. In any other sphere of the economy, a major industrial disaster is likely to have adverse, long-term financial consequences for the company or companies whose product or activity was involved in the accident, regardless of actual cause or legal liability. Thus, the people of Bhopal may still be paying for the poisonous gas which descended over their city in December 1984 but Union Carbide became such a toxic brand that it eventually went bust. Last year's oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has also blown a large hole in the profits of BP. But under the perverse economic logic of the nuclear industry, disasters like the one unfolding at the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan only mean more business for the world's biggest atomic energy vendors.

According to Dan Yurman, a consultant for firms connected to the American nuclear industry, two giant nuclear consortia are forming to manage the clean-up of the Fukushima site. “The first consortium is composed of General Electric and Hitachi, with support from Exelon and Bechtel. The second group is led by Toshiba which is partnered with the U.S. branch of Areva, the French state-owned nuclear giant. Babcock & Wilcox and The Shaw Group are part of the Toshiba team,” he writes in his excellent and authoritative blog, Nuke Notes. Incidentally, cleaning up isn't really their core competence. GE, Hitachi, Areva, Babcock & Wilcox and Toshiba are all in the business of building components for nuclear power plants.

In case readers have failed to spot the irony, let me be blunt about what's going on here. First, you get paid to sell a reactor in a foreign country. Then, under an international liability regime that is explicitly designed to favour you, the entire burden for site remediation and victim compensation in the “highly unlikely” event of an accident is shifted on to the plant operator. Finally, if and when that “highly unlikely” accident does occur, you are not only insulated from any financial claims but you actually get paid even more handsomely to come in and help clean up the mess!

Exactly how much money are we talking about? Yurman estimates the cost of decommissioning the six reactors at the site could be as much as $12 billion and would take more than a decade to complete. “Industry experts agree this won't be an ordinary job of tearing down a safe and cold reactor. For instance, to remove the spent fuel from Unit 4, a giant superstructure will have to be built around the devastated secondary containment structure to safely load the hot fuel assemblies underwater into special transportation casks.” Indeed, so lucrative is this project that the two consortia — which consist of companies that otherwise fiercely compete with each other for contracts and projects — “are reported to be having exploratory talks to combine forces.”

As for the $12 billion required to pay these companies for the clean-up, where is such a huge sum likely to come from? From the victims of the accident, the Japanese people, who else! “The Japanese government is said to be considering a form of receivership for the Fukushima site which would allow taxpayer funds to cover clean-up costs and pay compensation to people forced to evacuate their homes within the 13 km government defined danger zone around the plants,” notes Yurman.

As far as the Indian debate over nuclear energy is concerned, the unfolding Fukushima scenario poses an urgent challenge on three different fronts: estimating the true cost of nuclear power, assigning liability in the event of a nuclear accident in a way that is both equitable and efficient, and ensuring the highest possible standards of safety and regulation. As of today, despite the government's ambitious plans for the construction of 20 or more nuclear reactors across the country, there is little or no clarity or transparency on these vital issues.

The Indo-U.S. nuclear agreement — which paved the way for actualisation of these grand targets — led to intense political divisions at the time it was being negotiated but the debate over the optimum energy mix for India must be conducted independently of those fault lines. The deal may have been sold to the Indian and global public as a cheap and green solution to the country's power shortage but its primary economic utility today lies in presenting our planners with a wider set of energy options. A door has been opened for India to access nuclear material and technology which was unfairly denied to it in the past but any decision to walk through that door and fill our shopping cart must be based on a sound cost-benefit analysis.

Post-Fukushima, we now know, for example, that the cost of clean-up in the event of a “low-probability” event must also be factored in to the equation. Once the $12 billion bill the Japanese taxpayers are going to be saddled with to permanently entomb the highly radioactive reactors there is retrospectively fed into the cost of electricity that the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) generated over the years, the true per unit tariff is likely to be much higher than the figure TEPCO worked with when the decision to build the reactors was originally made.

Here in India, the Planning Commission should now go back to the drawing board and ask itself whether it still makes financial sense to produce electricity at any given location through large and expensive imported reactors when there may be cheaper options available over the medium term. It may still be that nuclear energy makes economic sense but it is vital that the decision we take be based on a realistic assessment of actual and probabilistic costs over the entire life cycle of a nuclear plant.

As for liability, the Manmohan Singh government owes a debt of gratitude to those who criticised it during last year's debate over the controversial liability law. If the watered down version had been passed, as the American nuclear industry was insisting, our leaders would be running for political cover today.

Fukushima is a confirmation of the need for tough liability legislation, especially since the cause of the accident lay, at least partly, in deficient design. As the 16 leading nuclear scientists who recently sent a letter on nuclear safety to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director General noted, “It appears that, in the siting and design of the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear plants, an unlikely combination of low-probability events (historic earthquake plus historic tsunami leading to loss of all electrical power) was not taken sufficiently into account." Rational liability laws are essential for ensuring the nuclear vendor pays adequate attention to safety in coming up with his designs. Optimum safety can only be built in if the vendor is forced to internalize the cost of an accident, something liability laws in Japan and elsewhere do not do. The Indian law is an improvement over the prevailing global model but post-Fukushima, many will argue for its further strengthening.

“We are confident that only nuclear power that avoids being a threat to the health and safety of the population and to the environment is acceptable to society,” the 16 nuclear scientists, including Anil Kakodkar, former head of the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE), said in their letter. They added: “It is necessary to ensure that national nuclear safety regulators in all countries are fully independent in their decision-making on nuclear safety and to assure their competence, resources and enforcement authorities.”

Unfortunately, India today has no such body of regulators.

Even on paper, the “autonomous” Atomic Energy Regulatory Board cannot remotely be called “fully independent” since it reports eventually to the Atomic Energy Commission, which, in turn, is chaired by the head of the DAE. As Prashant Reddy, a research associate at the National University of Juridical Sciences in Kolkata, has noted, “This is like making the Securities & Exchange Board of India [SEBI] responsible to the Bombay Stock Exchange and then expecting SEBI to function as an independent, autonomous regulator.” The government is understood to be working on a proposal to create a truly independent regulator for the nuclear industry but what eventually emerges from its internal review process is anybody's guess.

Meanwhile, the decision to push ahead with construction activity at Jaitapur and other places has evoked a strong negative reaction from local communities. Opposition parties like the Shiv Sena may be trying to exploit people's fears but the government's failure to be open and transparent in its conduct at the grassroots level is what has created fertile ground for protest. Radioactive pollution, in the “low-probability” event of an accident, has a half-life of hundreds of years. Will the skies fall upon us if Jaitapur and other projects are put on hold for a fraction of that time, so that citizens at large — and the concerned local communities — can be convinced through argument and debate that putting up nuclear plants in their backyard is a safe and economical way of generating electricity?

Odyssey Dawn, a Homeric tragedy

2011-03-24T20:17:00.002+05:30

Two games of domino are under way in West Asia and North Africa, one of mass struggle against U.S.-backed regimes, the other of military intervention aimed at co-opting or defeating the popular revolts...

March 24, 2011
The Hindu

Odyssey Dawn, a Homeric tragedy

Siddharth Varadarajan

Muammar Qadhafi may be a threat to his own people but the bombing of Libya by France, Britain and the United States demonstrates beyond doubt that these three imperial powers are a threat to international peace and security.

With its overdeveloped military capabilities and astonishing levels of political cynicism, the West's drive to intervene in the internal affairs of the North African republic has been remarkably smooth and swift. Thanks in no small measure to a ‘global' news media with an inexhaustible capacity to serve as cheerleaders for war, U.S., British and French ordnance has started raining down on Libya barely weeks after the civil war there began. The West's latest adventure has also been helped along by the naivety of liberals and leftists, last seen in action during Nato's aggression against Yugoslavia in 1999. Of great help, too, has been the opportunism of the Arab League, all of whose members, without exception, run regimes that throttle the voice and rights of their own citizens.

Though Brazil, Russia, India, China and Germany abstained when the sanction for intervention was put to vote in the United Nations Security Council last week, it does not absolve them of their failure to mount an effective political challenge to the drive for war. Since these countries knew the consequences of this irresponsible course of action, they should have moved quickly to mobilise the African Union, of which Libya is a part, so that the “regional” imprimatur for war which the P-3 fabricated with the help of the League of Arab States could have been countered. Russia and China should also have insisted that they would veto the resolution if any attempt were made to push it through without the Security Council first hearing a comprehensive report on the situation in Libya from the Secretary-General's Special Representative.

We know from the absence of concrete or credible media reports on mass civilian casualties that any delay caused by a high-level external political initiative would not have led to a humanitarian catastrophe. Ironically, journalists from the West and other Arab countries had free access to eastern or “liberated” Libya, for at least three weeks prior to the U.N.'s authorisation of force. This was the period when Col. Qadhafi's use of his air force first prompted western calls for a no-fly zone. Despite this, the death toll of combatants and civilians the journalists in eastern Libya reported was not that much higher than the total number of civilians killed by the Hosni Mubarak regime in Egypt.

The decision to attack Libya is wrong on three grounds. First, the motive is not humanitarian but political and strategic. Second, it rests on dubious legality. Third, the intervention, because it is poorly conceived and ill-thought out, is likely to cause more harm than good for Libya, its people and the wider region.

Let's start with the motives. The ‘responsibility to protect' doctrine which morally underpins the attack on Libya is still not a part of customary international law but even its advocates must agree that the selective and politically expedient invocation of R2P robs the doctrine of its normative force.

Why does only Libya get attacked or referred to the International Criminal Court and not other countries? If there is one country in the Middle East which has threatened international peace and security for decades and which, even as these words are being written, has launched its air force, yet again, against a defenceless civilian population, it is Israel. Yet never have the cheerleaders for the war on Libya argued in favour of a mandatory no-fly zone to protect the Palestinian and Lebanese people from Israeli airstrikes.

Two years ago, just before the inauguration of Barack Obama as President of the United States, the Israeli military killed hundreds of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Unencumbered by high office but with an election victory securely under his belt, Mr. Obama could easily have said something to urge the Zionist regime to back off. He famously said and did nothing and went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize for his silence. When a U.N. report authored by Judge Richard Goldstone of South Africa catalogued the war crimes Tel Aviv had committed during that war, the U.S. used its diplomatic clout to ensure the matter never came before the Security Council. Had it come, of course, any proposed action — such as a Libya-style referral to the ICC — would have been vetoed in the same manner as the U.S. vetoed the recent 14-1 draft UNSC resolution condemning Israel for its illegal settlements in the Occupied Territories.

Elsewhere in the region, civilians have been killed in Bahrain and Yemen, both client regimes of the U.S., drawing only mild public criticism even as every effort is made by America and its allies to bolster these undemocratic regimes militarily so that they can suppress the aspirations of their people.

Today, there is much hypocritical hand-wringing in Arab capitals that the western coalition's military campaign has gone beyond the original ambit of enforcing a ‘no-fly zone.' In fact, the text of UNSC resolution 1973 of March 18, 2011 is clear and unambiguous. Enforcement action in support of a no-fly zone is only a part of the wider use of force that UNSCR 1973 permits since the resolution “Authorizes Member States … to take all necessary measures … to protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, including Benghazi, while excluding a foreign occupation force of any form on any part of Libyan territory.”

Anyone familiar with U.N. matters knows that the crucial words in the resolution are “to take all necessary measures.” In the past, those five words have been enough to launch a thousand ships and missiles to distant shores and there was no reason to imagine that France, the U.S. and Britain would be restrained in interpreting and implementing their mandate this time round. Since the insurgent forces are operating in “civilian populated areas,” any military attempt by the Libyan authorities to re-establish control over the country can legitimately be considered a trigger for the West “to take all necessary measures.”

The problem with UNSCR 1973 is not the in-built ‘mission creep' but the fact that it is ultra vires. No resolution can violate the principles and purpose of the U.N. Charter. Article 2(7) is quite explicit: “Nothing contained in the present Charter shall authorize the United Nations to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state.” Customary international law recognises that a sovereign state indulging in genocide, war crimes or crimes against humanity cannot hide behind the shield of domestic jurisdiction but it is far from obvious that the Libyan regime — odious, undemocratic and violent though it undoubtedly is — has engaged in acts which cross that threshold. There are civil wars and international conflicts where the number of civilians killed by belligerents has been much higher — Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Gaza — but the international community has not treated these as war crimes worthy of intervention. In the absence of some reliable metric, then, UNSCR 1973 cannot authorise something that the U.N. Charter explicitly prohibits.

Turning from law to politics, one might still conceivably argue that some “higher purpose” justifies the western bombing of Libya if there were a reasonable expectation of a happy ending. Like the West's other wars in the wider region, however, its latest misadventure seems destined to run aground. The Iraqi and Afghan experiences demonstrate that establishing a new state, even in situations where the old regime is overcome quickly by military means, is a difficult process. The U.S. is a distant power and can afford to play games with the lives of other regions. But France and Britain will pay for fuelling instability and violence across the Mediterranean. The highest price, of course, will be paid by the people of Libya who have surrendered the initiative for change within their country to the U.S. and its allies and agents. Like the Iraqis who foolishly welcomed the American invasion of their country in 2003, the Libyans who wanted Operation Odyssey Dawn may well end up taking part in a tragedy of Homeric proportions.

How India blinked on U.S. inspections of PM's jet

2011-03-24T08:25:00.001+05:30

Wary of political fallout, New Delhi asked Washington to stay quiet on the fact that it had shifted the goalposts of the sale agreement

24 March 2011
The Hindu

How India blinked on U.S. inspections of PM's jet
‘India wary of image of U.S. officials tramping around head of state’s plane’

Siddharth Varadarajan

New Delhi: Three years after issuing a Letter of Offer and Acceptance (LOA) on Boeing aircraft that India was buying for use by the Prime Minister and other VVIPs, the United States unilaterally foisted an amendment mandating intrusive annual end-use inspections of them by American personnel.

When the Cabinet Committee on Security approved the purchase plans in September 2005, it was on the basis of an LOA that did not require physical inspection of the highly sensitive aircraft. But in May 2008, the U.S. handed over to the Indian side a number of changes to the LOA, including a requirement for annual Enhanced End-use Monitoring inspections of the Large Aircraft Infrared Counter-Measures (LAIRCM) the planes come equipped with.

The LAIRCM is a self-protection suite that allows the pilot to take counter-measures if the aircraft comes under attack while in air.

According to a cable sent to Washington on May 5, 2008 from the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi, accessed by The Hindu through WikiLeaks, the Indian side strenuously objected to the American demands when they were first made. In a meeting with U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense James Clad in May 2008, Ministry of External Affairs Joint Secretary Gaitri Kumar “raised Indian concerns over what it perceived was the ‘reopening' of the LOA for the Boeing VVIP aircraft India had agreed to purchase in 2005, specifically mentioning the ‘intrusive' end-use monitoring (EUM) agreement for the protection suite India was now being asked to sign as problematic. We don't mind if it is recast for some financial or technical thing,' she stated, ‘but to insert an EUM requirement retroactively and say if you don't agree we'll put it in storage, that would make our people flip'.” (152359: secret).

That India eventually agreed to American monitoring of the aircraft is already known, even if the details were never made public. But the Embassy cables give an unprecedented insight into the tug-of-war that followed the demand. The cables also reveal the “creative wording” the two sides used, in which India agreed to give U.S. inspectors annual physical access to the LAIRCM on the planes but the politically explosive term of “on-site inspection” was replaced by “on-site review.”

NSA’s appreciation

According to a cable sent on May 29, 2008 (155930: confidential), the amended LOA was initialled that day. In fact, National Security Adviser M.K. Narayanan expressed his “appreciation for the text's creative wording, such as using ‘joint consultation to include an on-site review' in lieu of ‘on-site inspection'”, because of “political sensitivities… over the principle of on-site inspections.”

The Indian side, however, remained wary of how the story would play out once it became clear that the government had allowed the U.S. to arbitrarily alter the terms of the aircraft deal. India made it clear on the day of the initialling that it wanted no public discussion of the fact that the goal posts had been moved. “Following [Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Mitchell] Shivers' expression of empathy for India's perception that the U.S. had added the EUM requirement after an initial LOA had been signed in 2005, Foreign Secretary [Shiv Shankar] Menon noted his appreciation but asked that there be no future reference to any ‘shifting of the goal posts,' rather that the entire deal had just been a continuum of discussions,” the cable, sent under the name of U.S. Ambassador David Mulford, recorded.

Other cables track the meetings Mr. Mulford had with Mr. Narayanan and Mr. Menon in the run up to May 29 in order to convince the Indian government to agree to that shift.

More than the substance of on-site inspections, the Indian government was worried about the public reaction to American inspectors getting access to the Prime Minister's plane, American officials dealing with the matter of end-use monitoring for the VVIP Boeing jets concluded. On May 14, Ambassador David Mulford met Foreign Secretary Shivshankar Menon to discuss the matter and “urged him to begin ‘sensible negotiations' to resolve the enhanced end-use monitoring (EEUM) arrangements for the VVIP jets quickly (153810, May 14, 2008, confidential). The cable quotes Mr. Menon saying he had been through the proposed amendment and that he felt “there are ‘no insurmountable difficulties in reaching an understanding that would meet your requirements and ours'.”

‘Reassuring’

Though Mr. Menon “found the amendment ‘reassuring,' because the details that it laid out [for keeping the LAIRCM secure] mirror those that the Indian government also wishes to enforce”, Ambassador Mulford wrote. “We have a huge interest to make sure it is well protected — not just by us but by others — and we have no problem with high standards, the Foreign Secretary stressed. At the same time, notes the Ambassador, “Menon also pointed out that, because the aircraft attracts high-level political attention, the presentation of the inspections regime needed rewrQing [sic]”.

Mr. Mulford ended his cable with the following comment: “At no point in the conversation did Menon reject inspections, and he appeared resigned to on-site verification, as shown by his acceptance of a site visit by negotiators. The problems that the Foreign Secretary saw in the US' proposed amendment dealt primarily with the cosmetic presentation it seemed, which he believes gives the impression of associating the VVIP aircraft, and by extension the Indian Government, too closely with the U.S.”

The Indian stake

In a meeting with Mr. Mulford (155283, May 23, 2008, confidential), the NSA “agreed that the Indian government had a stake in protecting the LAIRCM's technology, and he recognized that if the U.S. and India prolong negotiations over the EEUM, ‘our Prime Minister will not have a plane'.” But, he insisted, “We need to work in a manner that provides comfort to both sides.” Mr. Mulford ended his cable with the observation that “As Narayanan makes clear, on-site U.S. inspections of the prime minister's jet make the Indian government pause”. The risk, he wrote, is “that the UPA government's opponents might use the image of U.S. officials tramping around the Indian head of state's plane to garner votes in the upcoming general elections”.
Such an image “fits into the campaign messages already espoused by the opposition BJP, which accuses the government of an overriding weakness, and the Communists, who denounce the growing friendship with the U.S. But our willingness to resolve the issue in New Delhi at a high level could help alleviate the Indians' anxiety and point the way towards a middle ground that protects both the LAIRCM and the UPA government”.

Text of EUM note, initialled on May 29, 2008

May 28, 2008

Proposed EUM Note for Indian VVIP Aircraft:

“Pursuant to section 40A of the Arms Export Control Act (AECA), as amended, the USG will accomplish end-use monitoring for the defense articles and defense services transferred in this Letter of Offer and Acceptance (LOA) as set forth in this note and the specific Enhanced EUM physical security and accountability requirements annotated in the note to this LOA titled ‘Unclassified AN/AAQ-24(V), Large Aircraft Infrared Counter-Measures (LAIRCM) System (Revised).'

“At least annually, at the request of either party, at a mutually acceptable date, India and the USG will execute joint consultations, to include an on-site security review of the transferred articles and related security and custody procedures. India agrees to make available inventory and accountability records it maintains to U.S. personnel conducting end-use monitoring. The provisions of this note apply only to LOA IN-D-QJD and to no other transfers with the Purchaser or any other country or international organization.” [155930: confidential, May 29, 2008].

(This article is a part of the series "The India Cables" based on the US diplomatic cables accessed by The Hindu via Wikileaks.)

In the print edition of The Hindu, this story was split in to two. The URL of the second part is here.

Bribery charge must now be investigated

2011-03-19T20:50:00.001+05:30

The Embassy cable suggests a serious crime was committed on Indian soil to which U.S. diplomats were privy. The Prime Minister cannot cite lame arguments to justify inaction...

19 March 2011
The Hindu

Bribery charge must now be investigated

Siddharth Varadarajan

Since politics is a distraction, consider the following retelling of the WikiLeaks tale. An activist dies in a traffic accident. CCTV footage from a bank nearby suggests he might have been murdered but the case is never investigated properly. Three years later, a newspaper publishes what it says is an American Embassy cable sent a few days before that suspicious accident. In the cable, a U.S. diplomat quotes a multinational company executive talking loosely about how he paid money to some criminals to convince the activist to get out of his way.

How would a civilised country which values the rule of law react to such a disclosure? Would the government cite technicalities about the “unverified and unverifiable” nature of the “purported” cable and the executive's protestation of innocence and not even bother to ask the police to look into the matter? Or would it reassure the nation that even though the information is unverified, it will do its best to find out the truth?

In the face of the political firestorm that The Hindu's publication of a secret U.S. Embassy cable about payoffs to MPs has generated, all that the people of India needed was an assurance from the UPA government that the serious crime of bribery, if established by a proper investigation, would not go unpunished. What they got instead was cynical obfuscation.

Speaking in Parliament on the subject, Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh have mounted a ‘technical' and wholly ineffective defence of the government.

The July 17, 2008 cable sent by U.S. Charge d'Affaires Steven White stated that a Congress politician named Nachiketa Kapur — described as a “political aide” to Captain Satish Sharma, M.P. — showed an Embassy staff member “two chests containing cash and said that around Rupees 50crore-60 crore (about $25 million) was lying around the house for use as pay-offs” to MPs to ensure that the Manmohan Singh government won the confidence vote that was set for July 22. The cable, which was accessed by The Hindu from WikiLeaks, also quotes Mr. Kapur saying Ajit Singh's Rashtriya Lok Dal was paid Rs.10 crore for each of its MPs.

That the RLD was actively being wooed can be seen from the Union Cabinet's July 17, 2008 decision to rename Lucknow airport ‘Chaudhry Charan Singh Airport' after Mr. Ajit Singh's father. Other inducements were also on offer but in the end, the RLD voted against the government. Here Nachiketa Kapur turned out to have been remarkably prescient. After claiming the RLD MPs had been paid off, the Embassy cable notes: “Kapur mentioned that money was not an issue at all, but the crucial thing was to ensure that those who took the money would vote for the government.”

In the face of this damaging information which is contained in a secret cable that was never meant to be publicly circulated (that too in a redacted form) till at least 2018, Mr. Mukherjee and Dr. Singh made five lame points.

First, the Finance Minister told Parliament on Thursday that since the allegation of bribery applies to the 14th Lok Sabha which has since been dissolved, the 15th Lok Sabha had no locus standi to discuss the issue.

Second, he said the cable was a sovereign communication between different branches of the U.S. government, was covered by diplomatic immunity and that the information it contained could neither be confirmed nor denied by India. Despite the U.S. State Department saying publicly last year that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had spoken to External Affairs Minister S.M. Krishna to warn him of the impending publication of confidential cables by WikiLeaks, Dr. Singh told Parliament: “The Government of India cannot confirm the veracity, contents or even the existence of such communications.”

Third, the Finance Minister said the information about bribery in the cable would not be considered admissible evidence in any court of law. The Prime Minister added that “many of the persons referred to in those reports have stoutly denied the veracity of the contents,” as if the country ought to be satisfied by mere protestations of innocence by the accused.

The government's fourth argument was that a Parliamentary committee had probed the matter and concluded that there was “insufficient evidence.” Finally, the Prime Minister took refuge behind the “court of the people,” declaring that since the Congress got re-elected in 2009 the charge of bribery had been “rejected by the people.” By this logic, the Congress has no right to accuse Narendra Modi of complicity in the 2002 massacres since this allegation has been “rejected by the people” not once but twice.

Instead of hiding behind technicalities and dubious political arguments, government managers could have defused the crisis by promising that the information contained in the cable would be probed. It is nobody's claim that the contents of a U.S. Embassy cable should be treated as gospel truth. Of course, the reason the cable struck a wider chord is because there is corroborating evidence of bribery having taken place in the run-up to the confidence vote. There are video recordings from a sting operation conducted by CNN-IBN and a Parliamentary committee tasked with probing the matter in 2008 felt there was enough material for the appropriate investigative agencies to conduct a probe. That said, the Embassy cable's contents still need to be verified.

Captain Satish Sharma, Nachiketa Kapur and Ajit Singh have all said the allegations against them are false. Captain Sharma has denied Mr. Kapur was ever his political aide and the latter has said he had only passing contact with the Congress MP and with U.S. Embassy officials. Are they lying? Or was the U.S. Embassy staff member being economical with the truth when he told the Charge d'Affaires he had been shown the cash?

A proper police investigation conducted by an agency like the CBI under the supervision of the Supreme Court can certainly make a fair attempt to establish where the burden of truth lies.

Mr. Mukherjee is right that the cable is sovereign diplomatic communication but India can surely request its “strategic partner” to help probe an allegation that has diminished the country's democratic institutions in the eyes of its people and the world. For starters, the U.S. can be asked to identify the unnamed Embassy staff member. If he was an Indian employee or an American without diplomatic status, there would be absolutely no problem in the CBI recording his statement and asking him to join a criminal investigation. He could tell us, for example, where his conversation with Mr. Kapur took place. The staffer reported back to Mr. White that he was told Rs.50 crore or Rs.60 crore was “lying around the house.” Which house was he referring to? Even if the Embassy “staff member” was a diplomat — one theory is that it was the Political Counsellor himself who dropped his descriptor because he had inadvertently become party to a criminal act — diplomatic immunity would not come in the way of him informally helping the police in their investigation. India can also ask the U.S. to waive his immunity. Moreover, the call records of Captain Sharma and Mr. Kapur can be examined to fix their physical locations and ascertain the nature of their relationship, especially on the day the meetings mentioned in the cable took place. This can then be triangulated with the telephone number of the U.S. Political Counsellor, whose number is known to the Indian authorities. These are the minimum steps that any self-respecting democracy would want to take in the face of such a serious charge.

On the eve of the July 22, 2008 vote of confidence, I wrote an op-ed in The Hindu where I said: “Even if the government wins the trust vote on Tuesday, the Prime Minister and the Congress will not be able to live down the taint of impropriety surrounding their victory.” The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that the listlessness, drift and corruption that so many commentators have indicted the Manmohan Singh government for in its second innings have their origins in the manner in which that trust vote was won. The UPA lost its moral centre that day, and with it, its political bearings.

In a hideous coincidence, the taint of bribery has come back to haunt the government at a time when the nuclear dream which was supposed to make it all worth it is slowly evaporating in plumes of deadly radioactive steam above Japan. “If implemented in the way it is promised, [the nuclear deal] would increase the country's energy options in the long-run,” I wrote in the same op-ed. “But no deal is so good that it merits the short-circuiting of democratic propriety through horse-trading or worse.”

The Opposition is wrong to insist that the Prime Minister must resign because of the leaked cable. But he has a moral obligation to ensure the cable's contents are investigated properly. Refusing to do so would be an act of immense political folly, especially in the light of all the scam allegations that have buffeted his government.

It's time to get down to business

2011-02-19T18:54:00.003+05:30

Manmohan Singh's second term has seen huge scams but also action against crony capitalism of a kind India has never experienced. Which trend will finally prevail?

19 February 2011
The Hindu

It's time to get down to business

Siddharth Varadarajan

Anyone trying to predict the outcome of our polity's life and death struggle with crony capitalism will have to make sense of two contradictory sets of images.

On the one hand is the obfuscation and prevarication that senior Ministers have served up when confronted with the reality of the 2G spectrum scam and other unprecedented instances of corporate and political robbery. The most recent display of this was by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh himself, who needlessly played down the scale and significance of the revenue loss that the 2G scam had caused. But, on the other, are the pace and scope of the current investigation, which has also been unrivalled by anything India has witnessed so far. The same Prime Minister whose silence and ambivalence on 2G was seen by the Opposition and the public at large as weakness and even complicity has pushed the Central Bureau of Investigation into summoning and questioning top industrialists like Anil Ambani, raiding Kalaingar TV, the business arm of a key political ally, the DMK, and sending A. Raja, who was Telecom Minister till some time ago, to the unwholesome confines of Tihar Jail.

These are extraordinary developments by any yardstick and government managers have let it be known that there is further excitement in the offing. In the days and weeks ahead, more iconic businessmen are likely to be questioned for their involvement in the spectrum allocation scam. Nor will Shahid Balva be the only high net worth individual to be packed off to judicial remand.

When the leaked Radia tapes exposed a small part of the inner workings of the India establishment, our crony capitalists banded together to plead privacy and complain loudly about a “witch hunt.” Top corporate figures and even some politicians spoke about the danger of India becoming a “banana republic” and issued dark warnings in serial interviews about how the investment climate in the country was being adversely affected by the absurd suggestion that respectable businessmen might actually be involved in scams. The purpose of that fully scripted campaign was to ensure that the media, the investigating agencies and the courts all back off. Fortunately for our body politic, that has not happened. Public disaffection is so high that none of the estates of our system can afford to be seen as slackening. And that includes the executive too, notwithstanding the ‘zero loss' logic it foolishly put out. In his testimony to the Public Accounts Committee of Parliament, the CBI director was at pains to distance himself from that arithmetic of denial. Though the agency was painfully slow in getting off the block, nobody can really fault its current approach. And the credit for that must be shared equally by the media, the courts but also, ironically, Dr. Singh.

Yes, the Supreme Court is monitoring the functioning of the CBI but there are scores of cases where similar monitoring has produced nothing even remotely so dramatic. The Mulayam Singh disproportionate assets case, for one. When you are in government service, individual acts of bravery without the requisite air cover can be risky. As the police officers who raided the offices of Reliance Industries in New Delhi 13 years ago when Atal Bihari Vajpayee was Prime Minister discovered, taking on the biggest captains of industry is not exactly a career advancing move. If today, the younger Ambani is answering questions about his role in Swan Telecom, there should be no doubt in anyone's mind that the agency has received pretty direct encouragement from the highest levels of the government.

The question, of course, is whether or not the CBI will persist in its endeavours. Are we being treated to an elaborate dog-and-pony show? Or does the agency's current activism represent a fundamental course correction for a system which has tolerated and thrived on corruption? If yes, does the Prime Minister have the political clout to see things through?

Rent seeking and money making have been fellow travellers of the Indian political system for more than four decades but this is arguably the first time that a Minister has been run out of office and sent to jail as part of a criminal investigation. Never before has the role of big business come under the scanner like this either. When the Bharatiya Janata Party came to power at the Centre in 1998, it promised clean governance. What the country got instead was sweetheart deals in the form of privatisation of hotels and other public sector assets, the petrol pump scam, the coffin scam and other crooked ventures. As the Justice Shivraj Patil report has catalogued, the rot in telecom policy and spectrum allocation also started then. But nothing was ever probed.

The United Progressive Alliance inherited this corrupt system and presided over its unprecedented expansion. Thanks to whistleblowers, upright auditors, a vigilant media and a fair bit of corporate rivalry, however, the truth about 2G, the Commonwealth Games and other money-making enterprises has slowly come trickling out. There are, of course, scores of other fishy deals that need probing too, especially those involving land grants and mining concessions.

What explains the schizophrenic attitude of the United Progressive Alliance government towards the 2G scam? Why does the Prime Minister peddle the fiction that companies like Swan or Unitech did not resell their spectrum (for a profit) but only expanded their equity base, when the sale of equity for a company which has no assets other than spectrum amounts to the same thing? Why does he persist in comparing the loot of public money via the sale of cheap spectrum to the cost of providing food subsidies for the poor — even as the CBI is pounding on the doors of the companies that benefited from the 2G allocation?

As an economist and a man of unquestionable integrity, Dr. Singh knew full well the revenue consequences of forgoing an auction for the allocation of 2G spectrum and recorded his unhappiness with the decision. Even if he is right in saying that he could not have been expected to get into the minutiae of decisions in all Ministries, this can at best explain why he allowed the January 2008 spectrum allocation to take place. What it does not explain is the delay of 20 months in the registration of the first FIR by the CBI. In the intervening period, there was ample material in the press for the Prime Minister to realise something wrong had happened. His argument that the compulsions of coalition came in the way doesn't cut much ice. For one, the DMK, with which the Congress has an alliance in the Tamil Nadu Assembly, would have been bound by the same compulsions and would have been hard placed to rock the boat at the national level. For another, why wasn't safeguarding the public exchequer considered as good a reason for putting the fate of the government on the line as the Indo-U.S. nuclear deal? Finally, ‘coalition dharma' cannot explain the persistence of Congress politicians with questionable credentials in the Union Cabinet, men such as Vilasrao Deshmukh, for example, against whom the Supreme Court has passed embarrassing strictures.

If the Prime Minister were anyone other than Dr. Singh, one might be justified in treating his belated intervention in the 2G matter as an indication of his own involvement. In reality, the delay was the product of both his individual political weakness and his party's failure to understand the political implications of the scam. Today, it is obvious that vigorously pursuing the case is in the best interest of the government, the ruling party and the coalition. Such is the level of public disenchantment that if the Congress fails to punish the officials, politicians and businessmen involved, it will take a beating at the next elections. But there is also a wider, systemic opportunity the 2G investigation provides for the Indian polity. Capitalism needs rules. In mature capitalist economies, those rules are designed to allow businessmen to make “normal” profit and to use (or loot) the resources of the state as a collective. The growth of monopoly power, and thus supernormal profit, is also a “natural” part of the process of accumulation. When individual corporate houses attempt a short-cut, however, they invariably corrupt the wider political edifice. Corrupt politicians come and go. But unless the crony capitalists who use them are punished, Indian democracy will continue to corrode.

India-Pakistan talks: Two years and still counting

2011-02-05T22:01:00.002+05:30

Further delays in the resumption of dialogue with Pakistan will not make it easier to get satisfaction on the terror front....

5 February 2011
The Hindu

Two years and still counting

Siddharth Varadarajan

An entire year has passed since the Manmohan Singh government decided it was time to find a way to break the dialogue deadlock and kickstart the process of engagement with Pakistan.

During this period, Dr. Singh has met his Pakistani counterpart, Yusuf Raza Gilani, once, Foreign Secretaries from both sides have met twice, and the two Foreign Ministers sat together once, in Islamabad in July 2010. That encounter ended inconclusively, even disastrously, with the Pakistani host compounding the visible lack of progress made in their talks with the impropriety of a public diatribe against his visitor. When the opportunity for a second ministerial meeting arose at the United Nations where both Ministers spent a week in the fall, cussedness ensured a suitable date could never be found.

At the root of the Islamabad fiasco was the fact that neither side was willing to risk upsetting political equations at home by appearing to concede too much ground to the other. Pakistan's Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi wanted to be able to tell the stakeholders who matter in his country — the military — that he had got India to agree to a calendar for the resumption of dialogue on Kashmir and Siachen. But India's External Affairs Minister S.M. Krishna was not prepared to go that far. He wanted to calibrate any timetable for the resumption of talks on politically sensitive issues like Siachen to visible progress in the investigation and prosecution of those involved in the Mumbai terrorist attack of November 2008. What resulted, thus, was a stalemate.

On February 6, the two Foreign Secretaries will make a fresh attempt to press the reset button on the frozen process in Thimphu on the sidelines of a Saarc event. Unfortunately, they will meet under circumstances that are seemingly less propitious for a breakthrough with both leaderships under siege. In India, Prime Minister Singh is battling charges of dragging his feet in high-profile corruption cases and the Opposition's hostility towards him and his government has never been greater. In Pakistan, the killing of Punjab Governor Salman Taseer and the open sympathy his assassin attracted from religious clerics and sections of civil society have vitiated the atmosphere and put the liberals and the entire secular political class — which forms a natural constituency for cooperation with India — on the backfoot.

On paper, the government of Yusuf Raza Gilani is likely to find a second helping of whatever fare India served last July as unpalatable as the first. India, too, may feel it has no option but to spurn the Pakistani demand for a clear timeline for the resumption of dialogue in the absence of headway in the 26/11 case. And yet, a deeper look at the dynamics within Pakistan and at the core interests of India ought to give both governments cause to re-examine their attitude.

In a speech to the Research & Analysis Wing on January 21, the Prime Minister's Special Envoy for Pakistan, Satinder Lambah, spelt out the government's policy dilemma. “Engagement,” he said, “does not always assure us of a desired response, nor does it guarantee success. However, rejecting the process of engagement will not enable us to achieve our long-term goals.”

In relation to Pakistan, India's principal goal today is the permanent neutralisation of terrorist organisations which operate with differing levels of support from the establishment of that country and launch attacks on Indian targets. The second key long-term goal is the establishment of normal relations with Pakistan. In his speech, Mr. Lambah made the only public reference the Government of India has cared to make in all these years to the back-channel negotiations which took place with Islamabad from 2004 to 2007. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's measures to improve relations with Pakistan were based on the principle that “borders cannot be redrawn but we can work towards making them irrelevant,'' Mr. Lambah said, adding that a lot of progress had been made. “The ball is in Pakistan's court. We will be willing to pick up the threads.”

In my opinion, Mr. Lambah's words point the way towards the possibility of forward movement but only if both governments have the courage to acknowledge the illogicality of their current official positions.

Three paradoxes

India knows “rejecting the process of engagement” will not enable it to achieve its goals on the terror front and yet it is unwilling to talk until it sees satisfactory progress in the Mumbai attack case. A second policy paradox it must overcome is that it is reluctant to resume the harmless ‘front channel' talks on Kashmir even as it is “willing to pick up the threads” on the far more substantive back channel if Pakistan agrees. Finally, Pakistan, which has spent the better part of the past six decades demanding substantive progress on the Kashmir issue must explain why it is obsessed with the immediate resumption of the formal process (even though it knows this will lead nowhere) but is reluctant officially to embrace the back channel process and formula which offer the best chance for a speedy, win-win outcome.

For the past two years, I have been part of a Track-II India-Pakistan dialogue process that the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies in Delhi and the Jinnah Institute in Islamabad have been conducting. The meetings take place in Bangkok because neither government is willing to guarantee it will issue visas for all the participants coming from across the border, but that is the subject of another article! Besides strategic analysts and journalists, the ‘Chaophraya Dialogues' have brought together senior retired military, intelligence and foreign service officers, many of whom spent their entire careers planning and executing moves against the other side. Even in the tense atmosphere which prevailed following 26/11, these dialogues always produced a broad consensus in favour of engagement. But this tended to stop short of a fulsome endorsement of the composite dialogue process and the back-channel. Indeed, several Pakistani interlocutors — whether from military or political backgrounds — seemed reluctant to endorse the back channel. The military men said the venture was General Pervez Musharraf's ‘solo flight,' the politicians felt the process was tainted by its association with a dictator.

In our most recent round, however, both sides made some progress. “The absence of a formal and sustained engagement on the full range of issues confronting India and Pakistan is unhealthy, counterproductive and dangerous,” the Indian and Pakistani participants declared in a joint resolution. “We welcome the forthcoming meeting of foreign secretaries in Thimphu and hope that the two sides will be able to prepare the ground for the resumption of a comprehensive and sustained dialogue.” More significantly, the principle which Mr. Lambah spoke of — and which Khurshid Ahmed Kasuri, who was Foreign Minister in the Musharraf years, has also spoken of — found joint support: “We agree with the broad vision of India-Pakistan relations in which borders cannot change but can indeed be made irrelevant. We resolve that a dialogue between the two countries should include discussions on Jammu and Kashmir. The formal bilateral dialogue should be complemented by back-channel contacts. The people of J&K should be appropriately consulted in this process”.

Terrorism, the resolution noted, is of deep concern to both India and Pakistan. “Indian concerns about the Mumbai attacks in 2008 have seriously affected the dialogue process. The perpetrators of the attack should be brought to justice at the earliest. Pakistan has deep concerns about the tragic loss of lives in the Samjhauta Express attack. India has to expeditiously prosecute those involved and keep Pakistan informed.”

Taken together with the views of Prime Minister Singh's envoy, this resolution, which leading members of the strategic community in India and Pakistan approved, indicates a possible way forward. What is required is a process that can build on the Indian enthusiasm for the back channel with the Pakistani insistence on resumption of the front channel. One way to do this is to examine whether, after a suitable period of time, the two channels can be merged. After all, once the back channel reaches an understanding on broad concepts, translating it into actionable parameters will involve painstaking negotiation. It is significant that Mr. Kasuri made well-rehearsed statements during his recent visit to India to the effect that the Pakistani military brass, including Gen. Parvez Kayani, who was head of the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate at the time, were kept fully briefed after each back-channel meeting with the Indian side. No one in GHQ, Rawalpindi, has refuted what he said.

On terror, the aftermath of the assassination of Salman Taseer has brought home to most Indians the degree to which the Pakistani state is caught in a vortex. A system which cannot ensure justice when a high constitutional functionary is killed is unlikely to be able to offer India much relief on 26/11. This is not to say India should stop insisting on progress. But tying the future course of our bilateral engagement to this futile pursuit is unhelpful and counterproductive. Liberal Pakistanis say the resumption of dialogue with India will strengthen them in their struggle against the jihadis and the ‘establishment'. They may well be exaggerating their own influence and our own. In the worst case scenario, dialogue will turn out to be a placebo that will not help them or us. But India has nothing to lose by following their prescription.

K. Subrahmanyam, strategic thinker par excellence, 1929-2011

2011-02-03T15:33:00.003+05:30

Much more than a mere advocate of Indian nuclearisation, K. Subrahmanyam was instrumental in shaping the country's foreign and security policies in the post-Cold War world...

3 February 2010
The Hindu

Strategic thinker par excellence

Siddharth Varadarajan

Intellectual progenitor of the Indian nuclear weapons programme and by far the most influential strategic thinker of his own and subsequent generations, K. Subrahmanyam's enduring contribution was the coherent intellectual framework he helped provide for the country's foreign and security policies in a world buffeted by uncertainty and changing power equations.

He died in New Delhi on Wednesday after a courageous battle against cancer. He was 82.

In a long and distinguished career that began with his entry into the Indian Administrative Service in 1951, Subrahmanyam straddled the fields of administration, defence policy, academic research and journalism with an unparalleled felicity. His prolific writings — contained in thousands of newspaper articles (including in The Hindu), book chapters and speeches over four decades — touched upon a broad range of global and regional strategic issues and invariably generated fierce debate in India and abroad. But it was his early — and even controversial — advocacy of India exercising the option to produce nuclear weapons that made governments and scholars around the world sit up and take notice of his views.

Subrahmanyam's first formal involvement with the Indian nuclear establishment began in 1966 when, as a relatively junior bureaucrat in the Defence Ministry, he was asked to join an informal committee tasked by the Prime Minister's Office with studying the strategic, technical and financial implications of a nuclear weapons programme. Soon thereafter, he was made director of the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (IDSA), a post he held from 1968 to 1975. He was one of the first analysts to sense a strategic opportunity for India in the emerging crisis in East Pakistan and his public articulation of this well before the 1971 war led Pakistani officials to see him eventually as a Chanakya-like figure who managed to contrive their country's dismemberment.

Born in Tiruchi on January 19, 1929, Subrahmanyam returned to his home state of Tamil Nadu to serve as Home Secretary during the period of the Emergency. An honest and upright administrator, he considered the Constitution and the liberties it embodied to be of higher value than the political directives of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and the Congress party. At a time when his counterparts elsewhere in the country became willing accomplices to the suspension of civil liberties, Subrahmanyam used his powers to shield those being targeted. Many years later, during the Gujarat carnage of 2002, he was one of the few members of the strategic community to write about how the country would pay a heavy price if it failed to uphold the rule of law and the right to life of all its citizens.

He returned to Delhi in the late 1970s and ended up working as Secretary, Defence Production during Indira Gandhi's second tenure as Prime Minister. Differing again with the government on an issue of principle, Subrahmanyam was eased out of the Ministry of Defence and returned to the IDSA as director. Though intended as a punishment posting, he took to his new assignment as a duck to water. Through his efforts, the institute emerged as India's premier think-tank with a large number of scholars, many on secondment from the armed forces, conducting research on defence and foreign policy issues.

Journalism

After retiring from the government in 1987, Subrahmanyam continued to write on security matters, eventually joining the Times of India as a consulting editor. Journalism was in many ways his true calling. Affectionately known by his colleagues as “Bomb Mama”, in reality Subrahmanyam was far from being a nuclear hawk. He wrote on a range of issues, including on spiritual and religious matters and loved nothing more than to discuss national and global issues with his younger colleagues.

He was in favour of India acquiring nuclear weapons and argued forcefully during the international negotiations on the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty against India's accession. At a seminar in Washington at the time, he famously denounced American critics of India's stand as the ‘Ayatollahs of Nonproliferation on the Potomac'.

And yet, he did not believe it was absolutely essential for the country to conduct an actual weapons test. When Pokhran-II came finally in May 1998, Subrahmanyam was taken by surprise but accepted that the government's hand had been forced by the manner in which the United States had tried to foreclose the country's nuclear option. At the same time, he said that India should immediately announce that it would never be the first to use nuclear weapons, a position the Vajpayee government accepted.

After the Kargil war, he headed the Kargil Review Committee which was tasked with recommending an overhaul of the Indian national security and intelligence apparatus whose failings had allowed Pakistani soldiers to occupy high altitude posts in Jammu and Kashmir. Besides a host of systemic reforms, Subrahmanyam argued in favour of India establishing a National Security Council but was disappointed by the structure of the institution that the National Democratic Alliance regime created. He nevertheless agreed to head the first National Security Advisory Board and was also instrumental in the NSAB's formulation of India's Draft Nuclear Doctrine.

A realist in his strategic thinking, Subrahmanyam was one of the first to understand and discuss what the emergence of a multipolar world order – his preferred term was “polycentric” — meant for Indian foreign policy. He argued that India had the capacity to improve its relations with all global power centres. At the same time, he sought to leverage American interest in India's rise by pressing for the removal of restrictions on nuclear and high-tech commerce.

He also believed the emergence of an economically interdependent world meant the era of military conflict between the great powers was a thing of the past and that economic growth and internal strength would be far more important determinants of national power than mere military might.

For one who worked in government for many years, Subrahmanyam prized his independence which he saw as the key to his integrity. I have had three careers, he once said when asked why he had turned down the offer of a Padma Vibhushan — as a civil servant, a strategic analyst and a journalist. “The awards should be given by the concerned groups, not the Government. If there is an award for sports, it should be given by sportspersons, and if it's for an artist, by artists”. The state, he believed, was not qualified to judge different aspects of human endeavour.

Subrahmanyam, of course, excelled in all his endeavours. True to form, his most creative period as an analyst came after he was diagnosed with cancer. In his death, India has lost one of its most perceptive strategic minds. The void will be impossible to fill.

He is survived by his wife, Sulochana, his daughter Sudha and his three sons, Vijay Kumar, Jaishankar and Sanjay.

Ilina Sen wrongly booked under Foreigners Act

2011-01-26T08:23:00.000+05:30

The FIR filed by the Maharashtra Police against Professor Ilina Sen tells us a lot about the official attitude of the Indian establishment towards dissent, knowledge and intellectual freedom ...

26 January 2011
The Hindu

Ilina Sen wrongly booked under Foreigners Act?

S. Arun Mohan and Siddharth Varadarajan

New Delhi: The Indian Association for Women's Studies (IAWS) has strongly contested the Maharashtra police decision to file an FIR against Ilina Sen, wife of Binayak Sen, for her alleged failure to inform the police about the participation of foreign delegates at an academic conference organised by the IAWS and the Mahatma Gandhi Antarrashtriya Vishwavidyalaya (MGAV) in Wardha last week.

Prof. Ilina Sen, who is an Executive Committee member of the IAWS and head of the MGAV's Women's Studies Department, was booked under Sections 7 and 14 of the Foreigners Act on Monday. The police also arrested the owner of a local hotel where some foreigners were staying on account of the management's failure to inform them of their arrival.

The Foreigners Act requires hotel keepers and other persons who own, occupy or control the premises where foreigners are accommodated to submit such information to the authorities in a prescribed format known as 'Form C'. It is unclear how Prof. Sen, who is a coordinator of the IAWS, has been booked under the Act given that the relevant provisions apply only to persons who furnish lodging to foreigners for payment.

Umesh Chandra Sarangi, Additional Chief Secretary (Home), told The Hindu that the conference organisers had not informed the police about their stay. “These people came and stayed in a guest house which was booked. They were organising a conference. There is a rule that whenever a conference is organised, the police should be informed about it. The Director-General of Police is looking into the case,” he said.

In fact, the Foreigners Act itself places no such obligation on Indians who invite foreigners for conferences or social events. The four Pakistani and Bangladeshi participants named in the FIR were residing on the university campus. The IAWS sources told The Hindu that three of these women scholars were in fact staying in the Vice-Chancellor's residence as personal guests while the fourth was put up at the university guesthouse. Ironically, full political and security clearance from the Ministries of Home Affairs and the External Affairs had been obtained in advance for the participation of Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Sri Lankan scholars as government rules currently prescribe in order for visas to be granted.

The FIR filed by the ATS Nagpur Unit notes that Form ‘C' as prescribed under the Foreigners Act has not been filed by the University. However, Form C pertains only to ‘Hotel Arrival Information' and does not contemplate the present situation in any manner. The distinction is relevant as Section 7 of the Act, under which Prof. Ilina Sen has been booked, will be applicable only to instances where the accommodation is paid for by foreigners. In fact, the Home Ministry in 2001 scrapped a controversial 1971 order that required persons to report the presence of foreigners in their households.

Even if one were to hold the University responsible for failing to provide the required information, the responsibility for filing a C form belongs only to those running a hotel, inn or hostel and not to the organisers of an event in which foreigners participate.

On the concluding day of the Conference, the police entered the Yatri Niwas premises in Wardha, where a large number of women participants, mostly students and teachers, were staying to attend the event.

ACTION CONDEMNED

The organisers have condemned the actions of the police and expressed their anguish over unwarranted interference from the authorities.

Mr. Sarangi denied that the police had taken action against the organisers because Prof. Sen was Dr. Binayak Sen's wife.

(With inputs from Rahi Gaikwad in Mumbai)

Eastern promise, western fears

2011-01-25T18:42:00.004+05:30

Indians may be suspicious of China and the Chinese of India. But it is the West which does not want to accept the strategic consequences of a rising Asia...

25 January 2011
The Hindu

Eastern promise, western fears

Siddharth Varadarajan

Behind the heavy typeface that the release of confidential American diplomatic cables by WikiLeaks has generated lie smaller stories which sometimes tell us more about the way in which our world is changing than the headlines themselves.

The U.S. ambassador in Paris met Michel Rocard, a former Prime Minister of France, in October 2005 for one of those sweeping, freewheeling chats that Gallic statesmen evidently specialise in. The bulk of the conversation deals with the French political scene but at the end, M. Rocard shares his concerns about the place of France and the United States in the new world order and proposes a joint Euro-American think-tank to prepare for the future. “Speaking of the growth of India and China, along with all the other challenges confronting both of us,” the leaked cable quotes the senior French politician as saying, “We need a vehicle where we can find solutions for these challenges together — so when these monsters arrive in 10 years, we will be able to deal with them.”

So there we have it. Even as the Indian elephant and Chinese dragon circle each other warily, wondering how each will cope with the rise of the other, the Occidental mind which has enjoyed dominating the world and the global commons for two centuries is worrying about how to deal with the combined arrival of these two “monsters.”

Happily for the West, the arrivistes are not exactly on the best of terms with each other. India is too wary of China's rise to exploit the opportunities this ascent provides. For its part, Beijing — which alternates between feigning indifference towards New Delhi and fretting over whether it might join hands with a “democratic bloc” led by Washington — is so self-absorbed that it is unable to harness the externalities that India's rise has generated in the region.

In a recent article, Kishore Mahbubani spoke of the triangular relationship between India, China and the U.S. and noted how the U.S. had better relations with both India and China than the two Asian giants had with each other. By being in the middle, he argues, Washington has a strategic edge. It also has an incentive to ensure a certain amount of tension between India and China, so as to cement its own presence in Asia as an offshore balancer.

Though Mahbubani does not say so, it would be naïve to imagine the problems the Indian and Chinese sides have with one another are the product of an American conspiracy. The fact is that India and China do not know each other well and have not paid enough attention to understanding the social, political and economic dynamics of the other. As a result, misperceptions and misunderstandings abound and have given rise to suspicions and even fear. That is why it is essential that a continuous and wide-ranging dialogue take place between different stakeholders: officials, politicians, the military, scholars, journalists, artists and others. Above all, there must be engagement on the big strategic questions of our time.

In a series of interactions held recently in Beijing at the initiative of the Observer Research Foundation and the International Department of the Communist Party of China, Indian and Chinese analysts had a surprisingly frank exchange of views on the state of the bilateral relationship, the problem areas and the new areas for potential China-India cooperation.

From the Chinese side, a number of scholars spoke of four specific problem areas with India. There is, first and foremost, the unsettled boundary and the fact that border territories are disputed. Second, the presence of the Dalai Lama and the so-called ‘Tibetan government in exile' is seen as a continuing irritant, especially in the aftermath of the disturbances which shook Lhasa and some other Tibetan pockets in China in 2008. Third, and this was surprising, the scholars acknowledged that China's friendship with Pakistan was a source of friction with India. And though they differed from the Indian side in characterising the current nature of the relationship, they acknowledged the fact that “balancing India” used to be a primary Chinese motive in the past. Their argument was that the rise of the Indian economy in the past decade has forced Chinese policymakers to de-hyphenate their South Asian policy. Finally, many of the Chinese interlocutors spoke of growing strategic suspicions that are made worse by a trust deficit. “Many people in China believe Indians look down upon them,” a professor from the International Relations department of Renmin University said. “India sees itself as close to the West and is willing to be used by the U.S. in its desire to become a world power.” Other scholars echoed the same view in different ways — that India might become part of an American-led effort to gang-up against China, that many in India subscribe to the ‘China threat' thesis.

My own assessment is that the boundary dispute and Dalai Lama are not major problem areas. Indeed, my suspicion is that part of the recent brittleness in the relationship is the product of artificially accelerated efforts to settle the boundary question. As for the Tibetan spiritual leader, it is true that his presence in India is a red rag to those in China who see him as working against the unity and integrity of their country. But the Chinese side can also well appreciate the consequences of his being asked to leave India. A Hollywood exile for the Dalai Lama would only serve to raise the salience of the Tibetan issue globally. Besides, it is time China and India also start paying attention to what might happen to the Tibetan question once the present Dalai Lama is no more. And start engaging each other, and Bangladesh as the lowest riparian, on Tibetan water-related projects.

Responding to Indian queries on China's plans to harness the Brahmaputra, a scholar from the Chinese Institute of Contemporary International Relations spoke of the need for the comprehensive development of Himalayan hydropower resources. Citing Indian projects in Bhutan as a positive model, he said India's trust deficit with its neighbours like Pakistan and Nepal was coming in the way of the development of hydropower.

As far as Pakistan is concerned, it is obvious that China and India have a crucial stake in the stability of that country and need to discuss between them what they can do to help the situation there. The Chinese side is well aware of the emerging ideological and institutional fault lines in Pakistan. If there is any country other than the U.S. that has the ability to exercise leverage over the Pakistani military, it is China. Until now, however, China has been reluctant to use its influence. For more than four decades, Chinese strategic thinking on Pakistan has been dominated by the need to ‘balance' India. But with India having outgrown South Asia and Pakistan in danger of imploding as the problem of extremism and terrorism slowly gets out of control, Beijing cannot afford to remain wedded to this anachronistic mindset.

On strategic issues too, the Indian and Chinese sides have much to talk about. India and China are both officially committed to an open, inclusive architecture for the Asia-Pacific region. Both also have a stake in the freedom of navigation. During the visit to India by Chinese premier Wen Jiabao, the two countries committed their navies to joint anti-piracy operations in the Gulf of Aden. A commitment was also made to discuss the wider issue of maritime security. These are all promising new areas of cooperation that should be actively pursued. One Chinese scholar spoke of the need for strategic transparency, another made a pitch to launch new security principles by updating the Panchasila concept. Of course, such an effort is unlikely to go beyond the reiteration of homilies unless China and India both recognise that the world and their own national profiles have moved on since the 1950s. It has become a cliché to say the world is big enough to accommodate the rise of India and China. Since the world is a finite place, this means those who are today squatting on strategic space despite their leases having run out will have to be displaced. Let the West have nightmares about demons and monsters. The elephant and the dragon cannot afford to be scared of each other.

The fabric of belonging

2011-01-24T18:58:00.001+05:30

Had the national flag which the BJP wants to unfurl in Srinagar also been dipped by them to honour the memory of the hundred young Indians who were shot dead in the valley last year, Kashmir would be a very different place ...

24 January 2011
The Hindu

The fabric of belonging

Siddharth Varadarajan

Jammu and Kashmir is a part of India but the people of Kashmir can be forgiven for believing their country has forsaken them.

Throughout the summer of their most recent discontent, when a hundred young men and women lost their lives in police firing, leaders from the ruling and opposition parties acted as if nothing untoward had happened. Six months earlier, the mere threat of violence in Hyderabad led the Union Home Minister to declare the government had agreed to the formation of a separate state for Telangana. In Rajasthan, the blockade of national highways by agitating Gujjars produced an instant offer of dialogue and negotiation. But in Kashmir, the corpses kept piling up while the government, the Opposition (with some honourable exceptions) and civil society in the rest of India reacted with the kind of detachment reserved for death and destruction in faraway lands like Darfur and Iraq.

The fact that the public mood in the valley began to soften slightly only after an all-party delegation visited Srinagar and condoled with some of the victims' families underlined something quite unpleasant about ourselves. That the indifference of mainland India to the suffering of the ordinary Kashmiri is as much a factor in the alienation of the State as the politics of separatism and the violence of extremist groups operating with the tacit and sometimes overt backing of the Pakistani military. With characteristic indecisiveness, however, the Manmohan Singh government failed swiftly to capitalise on that initiative. When a group of interlocutors was finally appointed with a fairly open-ended mandate to listen, talk and report back, the mood in Kashmir had once again begun to harden. The fact that Dileep Padgaonkar, Radha Kumar and M.M. Ansari have still managed to make some headway in their interactions is more a result of their own personal commitment to changing the terms of New Delhi's engagement with the valley than with the attitude of the Centre and of Political India, which continue to send mixed signals.

One day, the Union Home Secretary tells reporters the government is prepared to pare down the presence of the security forces in Kashmir, the next day this statement is bluntly contradicted by the Defence Minister. The Prime Minister and Union Home Minister speak of amending the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act while the Army Chief announces publicly that he will never accept this. In the Machchil fake encounter case, the same general declares that his soldiers — who are accused of kidnapping and killing three young Kashmiri men — can never get justice in Kashmir, as if the State is not a part of India. Only the Army, he said, will be allowed to investigate the matter. Of course, in the Pathribal fake encounter of 2000 — where the Army has taken the Central Bureau of Investigation all the way to the Supreme Court to prevent its officers from standing trial for murder — the Army has not seen fit to even proceed against them under its own authority. Surely such a cavalier attitude to justice ought not to be tolerated in an integral part of India?

The Government of India rightly protested when Beijing began treating Kashmir-born or Kashmir-domiciled Indians differently from the rest while issuing visas for travel to China. But the same government does not mind treating Kashmiri Indians differently when it comes to issuing passports for them to travel. A Srinagar-born colleague of mine whose family left Kashmir to live in Delhi as part of the forced migration of Pandits from the valley in the 1990s was recently told by the Passport Office that she had to provide additional documentation that other Indians are not required to do in order to obtain a passport. As for Kashmiris applying for Indian passports in Srinagar, a recent documentary film by Ashvin Kumar, Inshallah Football, documents the heartbreaking experience they have to endure before the country which so emotionally claims them as its own will allow them to travel abroad.

Hoisting the flag

As the Centre's three interlocutors plough a lonely furrow through the infertile and even hostile soil of distrust and alienation, patiently listening to and cataloguing popular grievances, the Bharatiya Janata Party wants to rekindle a sense of estrangement by staging a provocative and high profile yatra to Srinagar in order to hoist the Indian flag at Lal Chowk in the heart of the city's commercial centre on January 26.

There is nothing patriotic or noble about the BJP's plans and intentions. Instead of a voyage of solidarity and empathy aimed at reassuring the people of the State that the party will fight for the sacred values of truth, justice and inclusiveness which the flag embodies, the party is planning an expedition based on the flawed belief that meaningless symbolism is all that is required to win hearts and minds and cement Kashmir's status as a part of India.

If a sense of national belonging can be instilled and solidified by the mere hoisting of a flag, 60 years of official ceremonies in Srinagar ought to have ended the sense of alienation that is writ large over the valley. Even if the BJP goes ahead with their mindless yatra, it will not alter the realities on the ground one bit and would actually make the situation worse. Whatever we may say or do or wish, surely Kashmir will be an integral part of India in a meaningful sense only when the residents of Srinagar themselves throng to Lal Chowk and hoist the tri-colour themselves. The challenge for the Indian polity is to create the conditions for that to happen one day, however difficult that may seem today. But the BJP's proposed flaghoisting is not just an exercise in naivette or cynicism. It is the product of a mindset that considers Kashmir to be terra nullius, an empty landscape to be coveted and possessed rather than a land with a people and soul who acceded to India in 1947 on the basis of a covenant which must be respected in full measure and who have as much right to a life with dignity as those elsewhere in the country do.

A politician can drape himself in the national flag but it is the texture of his politics which will determine whether he truly cares for the nation and its peoples or not. Today, the Congress politician and businessman Naveen Jindal is known not for fighting a landmark case over the right of ordinary citizens to fly the flag but for his endorsement of the obscurantist tradition of khap panchayats. Ministers and officials will preside over flag hoisting ceremonies on Republic Day throughout India even as their policies and actions in the preceding year have bled the hallowed earth on which they stand dry. Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel and the people of India know this only too well. If the BJP really wants to do something for the country, let them take their yatra to Karnataka. There is a large plot of land in that State which the party's chief minister signed over to his relatives. Let the process of safeguarding this country from those who are undermining its foundations begin by planting the national flag there.

Musical chairs on a drifting ship

2011-01-20T19:15:00.003+05:30

More than a reshuffle, the UPA government needs a new deck of cards and, much more urgently, a new game...

20 January 2011
The Hindu

Musical chairs on a drifting ship

Siddharth Varadarajan

Any ministerial rearrangement which leaves the big four portfolios of Home, Defence, External Affairs and Finance untouched is bound to disappoint headline writers but so underwhelming is Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's latest reshuffle that it is hard to understand the motivation or logic behind the entire exercise.

Three weaknesses

The United Progressive Alliance is suffering from three major weaknesses. The first is the public's perception — notwithstanding the ouster of Ashok Chavan from Maharashtra and A. Raja's resignation from the Union Cabinet last year — that Dr. Singh and Congress president Sonia Gandhi are unwilling to act firmly against corruption. The second is that cronyism and personal loyalties are seen as bigger virtues than efficiency. The third is that the Prime Minister himself is unwilling to lead from the front and stare down individual ministers who think they have the individual power to veto collective decisions.

So long in the making was Wednesday's reshuffle that it seemed as if Dr. Singh and Ms Gandhi might actually be willing to make the “course correction” the Prime Minister promised in his New Year's message. While the compulsions of coalition politics limit his options when it comes to the non-Congress ministers, he should have used the prevailing mood in the country to sweep aside Congress ministers who have either failed to make a positive mark or actually done damage. He could have also struck a blow for probity by ousting Vilasrao Deshmukh — indicted recently by the Supreme Court for abusing his authority when he was Chief Minister of Maharashtra — and asking Virbhadra Singh to step aside till he clears himself of charges that the High Court in Himachal Pradesh has already taken congnisance of. Had he done just that much, the Prime Minister could have overcome some of the negative atmospherics generated by the fiasco over 2G spectrum and the controversy over Central Vigilance Commissioner P.J. Thomas.

Unfortunately, none of this happened. Like old card players who never die — they just shuffle away — the non-performers in Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's cabinet have simply reshuffled their way to new ministries. And Mr. Deshmukh, whose illegal intervention in a police case in favour of a usurious moneylender ultimately cost the Maharashtra government a Rs.10 lakh fine, actually ended up getting a promotion. He has been moved from Heavy Industries to the much more crucial Rural Development portfolio, which is responsible for the rural employment guarantee programme of the government.

Sources in the Prime Minister's Office told The Hindu the reshuffle was intended to send a “perform or perish” message to ministers holding economic portfolios. Thus, Murli Deora, Kamal Nath, Virbhadra Singh and a few others who have not exactly set the Yamuna on fire with their performance were ‘demoted' to less grand ministries. Though Youth Affairs and Sports is not an economic ministry, his handling of the multi-crore Commonwealth Games too cost Mr. M.S. Gill that portfolio. One wonders, however, why these ministers weren't simply thanked for services rendered and their places given to others in the party who might do a better job all round?

The plus side

On the plus side, the biggest positive to emerge from the reshuffle is the transfer of Jaipal Reddy to Petroleum and Natural Gas, a strategic ministry that has never fully recovered from the exit in 2006 of Mani Shankar Aiyar. The pruning of Sharad Pawar's portfolio is another plus, as is the handing over of a crucial ministry like water resources to Salman Khurshid. Minority Affairs, however, will be an unnecessary encumbrance and one hopes the government will have the good sense to think out of the box and give that charge not to a minority politician but to a dynamic, secular non-minority leader with a genuine commitment to the welfare of the minorities. Taking tourism away from Kumari Selja makes no sense given the fair job she was doing; one can only hope the additional charge of Culture given to her is meant for the long-haul. As far as other changes — full cabinet rank for Salman Khurshid, Shriprakash Jaiswal and the induction of Beni Prasad Verma from Uttar Pradesh, for example — tactical considerations seem to have been uppermost in the Congress high command's mind with assembly elections in the crucial state less than a year away. Also, the ‘asset stripped' civil aviation portfolio — temporarily handed over to Vayalar Ravi — is being kept in reserve for allocation to the DMK if the political situation following the Tamil Nadu assembly elections warrants it.

Tactics, however, will take you only so far. Whatever end he hoped the reshuffle would serve, the Prime Minister is likely to find himself confronting the same political challenge tomorrow as he did yesterday: how to restore public confidence in his ability to lead a clean and efficient government. This was not the challenge the Congress faced when it got re-elected to power in 2009 and the party needs to introspect over how it has lost its way. The cabinet reshuffle indicates it is still not ready to do so. The official obfuscation over revenue losses caused by the arbitrary sale of spectrum and the confrontationist stand the Centre is taking over both the CVC and Joint Parliamentary Committee issues suggest the stalemate in Parliament is likely to continue into the Budget session. That this will be bad for Indian democracy is clear. But it is also likely to irreparably harm the political fortunes of the ruling coalition.

Sorry people, we're hanging up on you

2011-01-12T19:27:00.001+05:30

The Manmohan Singh government is digging an even bigger hole for itself by claiming there was no loss of revenue from the sweetheart sale of 2G spectrum to favoured corporate houses...

12 January 2011
The Hindu

Sorry people, we're hanging up on you

Siddharth Varadarajan

“Milord,” cunning lawyers have argued in countless Hindi movies, “how can there have been a murder when there is no dead body?” I was reminded of this line when I heard Kapil Sibal — who has been performing as an understudy at the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology ever since A. Raja was ousted on corruption charges — bravely defending the legacy of his predecessor at a press conference. By attacking the Comptroller and Auditor General's 2G spectrum scam report and claiming the government lost no revenue despite the fact that “procedural irregularities in the implementation of the first-come first-served policy” may have occurred, Mr. Sibal has done the political equivalent of removing the “dead body” from the crime scene and then declaring his clients innocent. For if the government lost no money through the sale of spectrum in 2008, it stands to reason that the politicians, bureaucrats and businessmen who are today being investigated could not have made any money either. Illegitimate profits cannot be conjured out of thin air — which is what spectrum essentially is. There is no dead body milord.

Sadly for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Congress president Sonia Gandhi, who no doubt prepped Mr. Sibal to make his ill-advised arguments, the CAG report is full of incriminating corpses. And their ghosts are likely to stick around long enough to haunt the ruling party at the time of the next general election.

The central thrust of Mr. Sibal's argument is that the PAC used flawed logic to arrive at the conclusion that the sale of Universal Access Service licenses by the Department of Telecom in 2008 led to a revenue loss of Rs.1,76,000 crore. But here's what he chose not to say. The CAG itself acknowledged in its concluding chapter that the amount of loss could be debated but “the fact that there has been loss to the national exchequer in the allocation of 2G spectrum cannot be denied.”

Indeed, the CAG made separate calculations based on four different methodologies in order to demonstrate the flawed nature of the licensing system the DoT ran. The figure cited by Mr. Sibal came from using the 3G spectrum auction proceeds as a guide to the revenue the government gave up by not auctioning 2G spectrum. Other methods used were looking at the sale of equity by shell-company licensees Swan Telecom and Unitech. Both of these companies sold a chunk of their otherwise worthless equity to established operators, thereby providing a helpful indication of what the licenses they had bought for a song were truly worth. Extrapolating from those sales figures, the CAG estimated that the government short-changed itself by anywhere from Rs.57,666 crore to Rs.69,626 crore.

The CAG report methodically establishes how the great spectrum robbery of 2008 was essentially a scam within a scam. The original scam was designed to benefit the universe of existing and potential telecom operators by selling them a scarce resource — spectrum — on a first come, first served (FCFS) basis at a seven-year-old price that had no bearing on current market conditions. Given the exponential increase in teledensity between 2001 and 2008 — by some estimates, the number of mobile subscribers had already risen from four million to 300 million and was expected to continue to grow at a rapid clip — the failure to use an efficient price discovery mechanism meant the government was prepared to forsake an enormous amount of revenue in order to benefit operators fortunate enough to get hold of new spectrum.

But having scripted super profits for the lucky telecom companies in the spectrum allocation process, it was inevitable that the politicians and bureaucrats running the show would take the next step. The only way to accumulate rent from companies benefiting from a giveaway that is available to all as a matter of policy is to use one's allocative power to favour some over others. This was the genesis of the second scam in which a handful of applicants — many of whom were completely unqualified to be applying for telecom licenses at all — were cherry-picked by the DoT in an arbitrary subversion of the first come, first served process. The CAG report demonstrates how Swan, in which the Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group had a key stake, and Unitech were among the beneficiaries of this. Bank drafts and guarantees were prepared in advance by some companies who were unofficially tipped off so that their completed applications for spectrum could be submitted literally within minutes and hours of the official call going out.

Mr. Sibal, who tore into the CAG, was sporting enough to admit there may have been some wrongdoing in the manner in which the FCFS policy was implemented. At the same time, he insisted the policy of charging 2001 prices was correct and that a 2G spectrum auction would have led to an increase in the price of telecom services. What he ignores is the fact that the cost of telecom services emerging from the 2G allocation will be a function not of the absurdly low price at which the government sold spectrum but of the prevailing tariff rate in the market and also the higher resale price at which this precious commodity finally enters the system. To paraphrase an argument first made by Sunil Jain in the Financial Express last year, there was indeed an auction for 2G spectrum whether Mr. Sibal approves of auctioning or not. But this auction was conducted not by the government, as it should have been, but by the companies who benefited from the arbitrary manner in which spectrum ended up getting allocated. They simply turned around and resold what they had received to the highest bidder.

Mr. Sibal also sought to argue that the government policy on spectrum allocation — of underpricing it or even giving it away free — was justified in the name of keeping the cost of basic telephony down. He compared the Rs.17 a minute cost of a mobile phone call a decade back with the 30 paise per minute rate today to prove his point but this is a flawed argument. Most technology-driven consumer goods and services experience a declining price curve over time. I paid $1,000 as a graduate student in New York for my first laptop computer in 1990. It was a no-brand, 386 chip, 40MB hard drive heavyweight monster whose battery lasted about an hour if I was lucky. Today, $1,000 will buy you a powerful notebook and decent variants can be bought for as little as $300. It also cost me $2 a minute to call my parents back home (which is why I rarely did so). The last time I was in the U.S., I could call India for eight cents a minute. The drop in call rates has nothing to do with subsidised spectrum as Mr. Sibal would have us believe, but with competition, increases in productivity and the global ebb and flow of technological change and obsolescence which allowed Indian companies to buy 2G network equipment at a relatively inexpensive cost. In any case, even at the supposedly low call rates in India, telecom operators are making serious money. The last thing they need is a free handout in the form of an FCFS spectrum allocation policy, that too one which is rigged.

The government's argument about keeping mobile call rates low may have had some credibility if the logic was applied consistently. But everything in India is contingent on whose asset is being sold to whom. When a public asset like spectrum is to be sold to a private company like Anil Ambani's Swan Telecom, or to Tata or others, we are told the price must be kept low even if there is a revenue loss. When a public asset like food grain is to be sold to the poor under the proposed Right to Food Act, the same people say prices cannot be kept low because this would lead to a revenue loss. When a public resource like Krishna-Godavari (KG) gas comes into the hands of an industrialist like Mukesh Ambani, the price must be kept high even if this means consumers end up paying a higher price for electricity and fertilizers. From 2G to KG to CWG the system's logic and rules will always be designed to allow maximum profits for those with real connections.

The CAG in its report has demonstrated how “the entire process of allocation of UAS licenses lacked transparency and was undertaken in an arbitrary, unfair and inequitable manner … which gave unfair advantage to certain companies over others.” It was this “unfair advantage” which allowed “certain companies” to earn revenue that rightly belonged to the government. So compelling is the charge of corruption on a massive scale in the spectrum licensing matter that the Supreme Court has said it will monitor the progress of investigations by the CBI.

Public disenchantment with the corrupt ways of our political and business establishment is running so high that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was forced to promise in his New Year greetings a “course correction” that would “cleanse governance” in India. If Mr. Sibal's arguments are any indication, however, Dr. Singh's New Year resolutions have not lasted very long at all. If the UPA government continues to remain in denial, it will pay a heavy political price. At the time of the next general election, when Congress managers scratch their heads and wonder where on earth the seats to form the next government are going to come from, Mr. Sibal's arithmetic will be remembered as the point where the game which was not going the party's way anyway finally slipped out of its hands.

Singed by WikiLeaks, Indian official says U.S. cable a lie

2010-12-31T19:24:00.000+05:30

‘Trip to Washington did happen, but it was private visit, not junket' ...

31 December 2010
The Hindu

Singed by WikiLeaks, Indian official says U.S. cable a lie

Siddharth Varadarajan

New Delhi: A former Indian official criticised for making unauthorised contact with the United States embassy and angling for a junket in order to “feed” American views on Iran into the Indian system, has accused a senior American diplomat of fabricating the contents of the confidential cable — published by WikiLeaks earlier this month — which “outed” him.

“I cannot answer for what [the former U.S. Charge d'Affaires Geoffrey] Pyatt might or might not have reported and if he did send such a cable, why he should have done so,” K.V. Rajan, a former secretary in the Ministry of External Affairs and a former member of the Prime Minister's National Security Advisory Board (NSAB) told The Hindu.

In the cable titled ‘Iran manipulating Indian elite opinion makers' of May 4, 2007, Mr. Pyatt — who is now the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for South Asia at the U.S. State Department — said Mr. Rajan sought an urgent meeting to discuss a Tehran-sponsored visit to Iran by Indian opinion-makers. According to the cable, Mr. Rajan said he had turned down the invitation but gave a list of the other invitees to the U.S. Embassy.

“To counter this new and worrying effort to reach out to Indian opinion makers, Mr. Rajan proposed a visit to the U.S., starting May 14, in his NSAB capacity, for five to seven days, to talk to officials, think tanks, and the intelligence community to discuss ways to understand better the U.S. assessments of Iran. He would expect this to feed into NSAB discussion of Iran policy options,” the embassy cable said. “To counter this insidious new Iranian effort, we recommend Rajan receive meetings, if possible, with xxx,” the cable concluded.

WikiLeaks redacted the names of the senior U.S. officials Mr. Pyatt wanted Mr. Rajan to meet. But The Hindu has been able to establish that the U.S. embassy sought meetings with four senior intelligence officials: Deputy National Security Adviser Elliott Abrams, National Intelligence Council (NIC) Vice-Chair David Gordon, NIC Deputy South Asia Officer John Dister and CIA Director of Intelligence John Kringen.

Mr. Rajan, who coincidentally travelled to Washington D.C. shortly after the cable was sent, denies meeting these or other officials during that trip.

The Hindu published details of the Rajan cable on December 18. Mr. Rajan, who was travelling at the time and could not be reached for comment, said upon his return: “It is true that an invitation was addressed to me by the Iranian government in my capacity as member, National Security Advisory Board.' After checking with the Ministry of External Affairs, I declined as it would have been inappropriate to have accepted such an invitation. I have no idea about what happened subsequently and certainly have no recollection about discussing the matter with any foreign diplomat, apart from conveying my apologies to the Iranians. I can emphatically confirm that I have never discussed the Iran non-visit with U.S. officials.”

Asked why Mr. Pyatt would fabricate a conversation which never took place in a confidential cable that was not meant to be read by anyone outside the U.S. system, Mr. Rajan said he could not answer for what the U.S. diplomat might or might not have reported.

He admitted travelling to the U.S. in May-June 2007, but denied that visit was arranged by the U.S. government. “I visited the U.S. and some European countries during that period in connection with seminars and conferences. The U.S. government/Embassy were in no way involved,” he said.

The U.S. trip “was for a conference and celebration of the silver jubilee of Washington Times,” Mr. Rajan said, when asked for details of the visit. “I did not meet a single one of the persons you have mentioned. Indeed, I can confirm that I did not meet any other official of the U.S. government either, before during or after the visit to discuss any other subject pertaining to foreign policy,” he added.

Describing himself as “not a particular favourite of the U.S. embassy,” he said: “My only guess as to the sudden affection they developed later is a gross misunderstanding of the reasons for my declining the Iran invite.”

With the State Department advising its missions and posts abroad not to engage with any questions stemming from the leaked cables, attempts to clarify matters with the U.S. embassy drew a blank.

Speaking on background, however, MEA officials said it was unlikely the U.S. embassy would invent a conversation or meeting which never took place. Indeed, South Block has been struck by how accurately the leaked cables have captured the contents of sometimes complicated meetings between senior American and Indian officials on a whole range of topics. “I think I'm going to go with Mr. Pyatt on this one,” a senior official said. “Look at the people Mr. Pyatt wanted Mr. Rajan to meet. Even if the meetings never worked out, a career diplomat would be mad to get State to pitch for top guys at the NIC and CIA on the basis of some made up story.”

Carrying anti-Iran tales, top official angled for U.S. junket

2010-12-18T20:17:00.000+05:30

Ratting out on his pals for an imaginary offence, he pushed for a trip to the United States ...

18 December 2010
The Hindu

Carrying anti-Iran tales, top official angled for U.S. junket

Siddharth Varadarajan
Sandeep Dikshit

New Delhi: India's first major embarrassment from the Wikileaks closet came tumbling out on Friday with the revelation that a top official had initiated unauthorised contact with the United States embassy to complain about Iran and pitch for a U.S. visit, where he could receive inputs that would then “feed the [Indian] discussion of Iran policy options”.

On May 4, 2007, K.V. Rajan — described in a confidential cable by U.S. Charge d'affaires Geoffrey Pyatt as “Former Secretary of the Ministry of External Affairs and then Chairman of the Prime Minister's National Security Advisory Board (NSAB)” — sought an urgent meeting with the U.S. embassy to inform it that he and a number of other Indian “politicians, scholars and commentators” had been invited by Iran on an “all-expenses-paid trip” to visit nuclear installations there and meet officials.

“Rajan told the Charge [Pyatt] that this trip was part of an effort of the Iranian government to encourage anti-American, pro-Muslim scholars and think-tanks in India to influence Prime Minister [Manmohan] Singh's supporters to take a more pro-Iranian, anti-U.S. view, and that his presence on the delegation would have handed Iran a Public Relations coup. In light of his suspicions, Rajan cancelled at the last minute, citing a sudden family emergency.” The cable then notes that Mr. Rajan provided the embassy a list of invitees.

“To counter this new and worrying effort to reach out to Indian opinion-makers”, the U.S. Charge d'Affaires wrote, “Rajan proposed a visit to the United States starting May 14 in his NSAB [chaiman] capacity for five-seven days to talk to officials, think tanks, and the intelligence community to discuss ways to better understand U.S. assessments of Iran.” Mr. Rajan “would expect this to feed the NSAB discussion of Iran policy options”, the confidential cable titled ‘New Iranian Mischief' added.

After hearing him out and noting reports of a visit to Iran's heavy water reactor at Arak that had appeared in The Hindu and The Asian Age, the cable records Mr. Pyatt's recommendation: “To counter this insidious new Iranian effort, we recommend that Rajan receive meetings, if possible, with [xxx]”. The names of his recommended interlocutors are blanked out.

Mr. Rajan was unavailable for comment and it is not known if the proposed trip materialised. But Indian government officials speaking to The Hindu on background said it was most inappropriate for an NSAB member to have approached the U.S. embassy in this way.

M.K. Rasgotra, the actual chairman of the NSAB at the time — Mr. Rajan having been a mere member of the board, it is not known why Mr. Pyatt described him as its head — reacted angrily to the revelation that a board member had approached the U.S. embassy to provide information and propose a trip for himself. “Firstly, I was chairman and there was never any mention of this bloody nonsense. I never sought to go out on any one's account nor did any member approach me to discuss this. He was clearly acting on his own. I am really surprised.”

Mr. Rasgotra, a former foreign secretary, said that all NSAB members take an oath of secrecy. Speaking on background, a former official of the National Security Council Secretariat said NSAB members are meant to provide reports only to the Government of India. “They are not meant to approach foreign embassies/governments. It is not their job to be doing diplomacy.”

The names of the respected Indian commentators who visited Iran in April 2007 are blacked out in the cable but their identities are no secret: Vikram Sood, former head of Research and Analysis Wing, India's external intelligence agency; A. Gopalakrishnan, former head of the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board; Anuradha and Kamal Chenoy from Jawaharlal Nehru University; Bharat Karnad from the Centre for Policy Research; and Amit Baruah, the then Diplomatic Correspondent of The Hindu.

Correspondents from this newspaper and other publications routinely visit foreign countries on official invitations. Asked for his reaction to Mr. Rajan's apprehensions about the Iran trip, Mr. Sood said he was amused at his presumption that seasoned commentators and ex-officials would be unable to form their own opinions on places they visited.

Time to reset the India-China relationship

2010-12-15T16:04:00.004+05:30

Sixty years have already elapsed without the boundary issue being settled. Waiting a few more years should not be a problem for either side, especially if it helps to 'deterritorialise' the relationship ...

December 15, 2010
The Hindu

Time to reset the India-China relationship

Siddharth Varadarajan

When Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Jiang Zemin decided in 2003 to appoint Special Representatives (SRs) to explore and presumably accelerate “the framework of a boundary settlement” between India and China, little did they imagine that their vast but disputed borderlands would end up casting a dark shadow on the overall bilateral relationship seven years later.

The Line of Actual Control in the western and eastern sectors may be extraordinarily tranquil but the artificially speeded up prospect of a boundary settlement has increased the salience of territoriality at a time when the relationship most needs a de-territorialised agenda.

China and India are confronting the same set of challenges that their spectacular rise has exposed them to, from globalisation and its imbalances to transnational security threats, environmental degradation, piracy, maritime security and political instability in various parts of Asia. As the two preeminent powers of the Asian region, India and China have an enormous responsibility to discharge — and discharge jointly. The burden they carry is too great to allow either the kind of assertive, ‘go-it-alone' strategy the Chinese seem to favour or the ‘bandwagoning with an off-shore balancer' that the Indians appear to prefer.

Instead of focussing inward on their disputed border, the two countries need to look together at the wider region and its challenges and see how the pooling of equities they do so well on global issues like trade, financial rebalancing and climate change can also occur on the Asian front. But this is not happening.

Two years ago, the Chinese side implicitly started questioning the status of Jammu and Kashmir by giving Indians domiciled in the State a loose-leaf ‘stapled' visa instead of the regular visa given to Indians from elsewhere. That China regarded Arunachal Pradesh as disputed and was pressing a claim in the SRs talks for what it calls ‘Southern Tibet' was well known. But the stridency of its assertions — especially its objections to Indian leaders visiting the north-eastern State — took the Indian side by surprise.

On their part, some Indian military commanders muddied the waters by making irresponsible public pronouncements which have fuelled both the jingoism and insecurity of a hyper-nationalist media and middle class. The suggestion made on background by some Indian officials that China's claims to the whole of Arunachal Pradesh violated the “political principles and parameters” governing the boundary settlement agreed to by both sides (because of the reference there to due regard being paid to the wishes of settled populations) may also have pushed Beijing into a more assertive mode. After all, from the Chinese point of view, if that were to mean all settled areas automatically belong to India then why are the SRs still negotiating?

Whatever the causes, however, it is clear that the prioritised quest for a boundary settlement, far from bringing the two countries closer, has emerged as a source of irritation and even tension.

In their own way, it seems as if both countries are aware of this negative dynamic. That is why, at their 13th round of talks in 2009 and again at the 14th round in Beijing last month, the two SRs opened a door for a wider discussion on issues of political and strategic concern. Hopefully, this new discussion will help ‘de-territorialise' the relationship.

The broad contours of the way New Delhi looks at Beijing were spelt out in a remarkable speech to the Observer Research Foundation by Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao on December 3.

Ms Rao touched on all the prickly issues from stapled visas for Kashmiris to the imbalance in trade, Chinese hydro projects on the Brahmaputra and the Sino-Pakistani relationship. But she also said the view that India and China are rivals “is an over-generalisation and over-simplification of a complex relationship which encompasses so many diverse issues.”

In the wider strategic community, there are other issues which tend to get flagged such as the ‘string of pearls' thesis and the fear that China is “encircling” India by building close relations with its smaller South Asian neighbours like Nepal and Sri Lanka. But these fears are not uniformly shared within the government.

As one examines the future of the relationship, it is useful to flesh out the areas where Indian and Chinese interests may actually diverge or converge.

If we divide Indian foreign policy analytically into three concentric circles encompassing South Asia, Asia and the world, then it is primarily at the Asian level that the two powers are rubbing up against each other. Within South Asia, which India would like to develop as a cohesive economic space, the primary obstacle is Pakistan. To be sure, Pakistan benefits a great deal from the military and economic help it receives from China, especially in the nuclear and missile spheres. But even in the absence of an axis with Beijing, the binding constraint in South Asia remains the role of the Pakistani military establishment in determining the fate of that country.

Elsewhere in South Asia, it may hurt Indian pride to see a major infrastructure project in Hambantota, Sri Lanka, say, go to a Chinese firm, but this is because Indian companies did not bother to avail of the opportunity.

In any case, physical infrastructure of this kind is not a zero sum game.

Last year, I happened to give a talk on national security to senior executives from a company with very diverse business interests. One executive asked me whether India ought to be worried by a report he had read recently of China planning to connect Nepal to Tibet by rail. Before I could answer, another executive put up his hand. He was from the clothing division and spoke about how the company's factory in Nepal imports fabric from China by sea via Kolkata. Each journey takes six to eight weeks. “If a rail link comes up from Tibet, I'll be able to bring in my shipments within ten days,” he said.

The wider point is that as China grows, Chinese companies will increase their presence in South Asia, especially India. By the same token, Indian businesses and economic interests are also getting entrenched across Asia, including South East and East Asia, where Japanese dominance has already made way for both China and South Korea. These developments would become “threatening” if they are imbued with a strategic dynamic that is powerful enough to overturn the imperatives of geography. In both South Asia and East Asia, for the foreseeable future at least, this is unlikely.

Globally, other than at the highest table — the United Nations Security Council — India and China have more in common with each other than with other big powers. True, Chinese companies have made spectacular commercial inroads in Africa but many of the infrastructure projects they have embarked on will generate multiplier effects that will create space for Indian and other companies to get involved. But it is on the question of Asia — East Asian security and the related question of maritime security in the Indian Ocean — that India and China seem, at least superficially, to be working at cross purposes.

From the Chinese point of view, preventing a U.S.-India axis in Asia is a key priority.

As New Delhi draws closer to Washington, Beijing feels it necessary to make its own overtures towards the Indians but also to take “defensive” measures of one kind or another. That is why China has alternated between criticism and negative rhetoric, on the one hand, and blandishment on the other. But this is a risky strategy. Overshoot with the negativity and you run the risk of driving India into willing American arms. Overshoot with the platitudes and the Indians may end up taking you for granted.

It is my sense that the Chinese inability to deal with the dynamics of the Indo-U.S. relationship is responsible, in large measure, for the up-and-down perturbations we have seen in the bilateral trend line since 2004.

India, too, has allowed itself to be paralysed by the prospect of a Sino-American axis and has tended to retreat into a strategic shell whenever the concept of G-2 rears its unwelcome head. Today, with G-2 in retreat and the Obama administration repeating the Sino-centric overtures to India that George W. Bush did, New Delhi needs to play its cards wisely. Prime Minister Singh should explain to Premier Wen that India wants strong relations with both China and the U.S., that it does not see one as a substitute for the other and that it certainly does not intend to sacrifice one for the other.

Second, that India and China need to work closely together on issues of Asian security and the emerging security architecture, and should not leave the heavy lifting that may be required to outside powers.

Third, given China's critical dependence on shipping, especially energy, across the Indian Ocean, and given India's strategic location at the centre of east-west SLOCs, the two countries ought to cooperate more on broad maritime issues, including anti-piracy, marine pollution and ensuring the openness of the sea commons.

Broadening the regional and global agenda is the best way to move away from the rancour that the boundary question has started to generate. Sixty years have already elapsed without it being settled. Waiting a few more years should not be a problem for either side.

Welcome to the Matrix of the Indian state

2010-11-29T19:55:00.001+05:30

The Radia tapes reveal the networks and routers, the source codes and malware that bind the corporate and political establishments in India.

29 November 2010
The Hindu

Welcome to the Matrix of the Indian state

Siddharth Varadarajan

As squeamish schoolchildren know only too well, dissection is a messy business. Some instinctively turn away, others become nauseous or scared. Not everyone can stomach first hand the inner workings of an organic system. Ten days ago, a scalpel — in the form of a set of 104 intercepted telephone conversations — cut through the tiniest cross-section of a rotting cadaver known as the Indian Establishment. What got exposed is so unpleasant that several major newspapers and television channels that normally scramble to bring “breaking” and “exclusive” stories have chosen to look the other way. Their silence, though understandable, is unfortunate. Even unforgivable.

After all, the tape recordings of Niira Radia's phone conversations have come to light against the backdrop of the recent Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) report on the allocation of 2G spectrum, which demonstrated how the rules were arbitrarily bent by the then Telecom Minister, A. Raja, in order to favour a handful of private companies at government expense. Among the beneficiaries of Mr. Raja's raj were Anil Ambani. And also Ratan Tata. In one of the tapes, an unidentified interlocutor asks Ms Radia, whose clients include both Mr. Tata and Mukesh Ambani, why “you people [i.e. the Mukesh Ambani group] are supporting [Raja] like anything ... when the younger brother [Anil Ambani] is the biggest beneficiary of the so called spectrum allocation”. “Issue bahut complex hai,” Ms Radia replies. “Mere client Tatas bhi beneficiary rahein hain (my client, the Tatas, have also been a beneficiary).”

Apart from telecom, the tapes also provide valuable insight into the gas dispute between the two Ambani brothers. This was a dispute in which Mukesh Ambani made skillful use of the “gas is a national resource” argument with a pliant media even as he used his influence with individual MPs to try and orchestrate a massive tax concession for his company from the same national resource, Krishna-Godavari (KG) basin natural gas.

In an interview to NDTV and the Indian Express on Saturday — two media houses that have so far avoided covering the tapes — Ratan Tata has called the recordings a “smokescreen” designed to hide the real truth. He is wrong. Utterly wrong. No doubt we know very little about who leaked the recordings and why these were cherry-picked from a wider set of 5,000 recordings the Enforcement Directorate and Income Tax authorities made as part of their surveillance of Ms Radia. But even if the story they tell is partial and designed to expose only a fraction of the corporate lobbying which has been going on, we would be naive to ignore the contents of the tapes or be dismissive about their significance.

In the science fiction film, The Matrix, Morpheus tells Neo, “You're here because you know there's something wrong with the world.” The Matrix, he says, is the world that has been pulled over everyone's eyes to blind them from the truth that they are slaves. He offers Neo the choice of a blue or red pill. “You take the blue pill and the story ends. You wake in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill ... and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.”

The Niira Radia audio archive loaded on to the Internet by Open and Outlook magazines last week is the red pill of our time. It reveals the source codes, networks, routers, viruses and malware that make up the matrix of the Indian State. The transmission of information, also known as “news”, between different nodes is vital for the system to work efficiently. The news is also the medium for reconciling conflicts between different sectors of the establishment. If you hear the recordings, you begin to understand the truth about the Wonderland that is India. No wonder there are many amongst us who would rather swallow the blue pill. For once you go in, the only way out is to keep digging. And yes, the rabbit-hole runs deep.

So deep, for example, that we hear a Member of Parliament, N.K. Singh, who is meant to represent the people and the state who voted for him, brazenly batting for a single-man corporate constituency, Mukesh Ambani.

In one recording, Mr. Singh tells Ms Radia of the firefighting he is doing on behalf of Mr. Ambani to ensure a tax concession the finance minister had announced in the 2009 budget for gas production is made applicable retrospectively. Ms Radia says she has killed news stories about the Rs.81,000 crore super profit Reliance Industries Ltd. (RIL) would make were that to happen but Mr. Singh is more concerned about what happens in Parliament during the debate on the Finance Bill. His fear is that if Opposition MPs make a noise about a largesse being given to one company, the finance minister would be on the defensive and the prospect of extending the concession retrospectively would not even arise. Mr. Singh accuses BJP leader Arun Shourie of being on Anil Ambani's side and reveals how he has managed to get Mr. Shourie replaced as the BJP's lead speaker by Venkaiah Naidu. How well does Mukesh know Venkaiah, asks Mr. Singh, who is a Rajya Sabha MP from Bihar on a Janata Dal (United) – JD(U) ticket. Ms Radia replies that a senior RIL executive, P.M.S. Prasad, knows Mr. Naidu well. “Then I am going to get him flown in today to talk to Venkaiah,” Mr. Singh says, “because if he is the first speaker, and he already takes a party line, then it will be very difficult for Shourie in his second intervention, to take a different line. Then we have to orchestrate who will speak, you know, this is the immediate problem right now. Because, frankly, if this doesn't go through, this tax thing, then it's a major initiative taken that then fails to materialise.”

We don't know if Mr. Prasad flew down and met Mr. Naidu as N.K. Singh wanted him to do. But the BJP leader's speech in Parliament two days later has this telltale suggestion: “The Bay of Bengal has become the new North Sea of India. Government departments should not be seen quarrelling whether mineral oil is a natural gas or not. Whatever concessions [are] needed for infrastructure, exploration ... are connected with the energy security of the country.” This was a veiled reference to the Petroleum Ministry's letter to the Finance Ministry asking for natural gas to be given the same tax concessions available to oil retrospectively and not just from the New Exploration Licensing Round (NELP) VIII round which would exclude RIL's KG basin output. A request the revenue secretary had turned down.

In other recordings, we see journalists and editors, who are meant to report and analyse what is going on objectively, offering to become couriers and stenographers and foot soldiers in the war one set of corporate fat cats is waging against another. We also see a political fixer, Ranjan Bhattacharya, whose USP once was his familial proximity to the Bharatiya Janata Party, seamlessly open a line to the Congress and go about his business as if election results don't matter. He boasts about his proximity to Ghulam Nabi Azad and his ability to send a message to “SG, boss”, a reference to the Congress president. He then quotes Mukesh Ambani telling him the Congress party is now “apni dukan”. Mr. Bhattacharya may have been lying about his influence but then the formidable Ms Radia is anything but a dupe.

We also hear in the tapes an iconic businessman, Ratan Tata, who today makes sanctimonious statements about crony capitalism and the danger of India becoming a banana republic, lobbying through his PR agent, Ms Radia, for A. Raja to be given the Telecom portfolio.

If the allocation of spectrum by the Manmohan Singh government in 2008 and 2009 is one of the biggest scams in independent India, then the involvement of businessmen like Ratan Tata, Sunil Mittal and Mukesh Ambani in lobbying for their choice of telecom minister when the UPA government returned to power in May 2009 is surely a very important part of the back-story. But it is a story none of the journalists who liaised with Ms Radia during this time chose to report. More than the squabble within the Dravida Munnettra Kazhagam (DMK) or between the DMK and the Congress, the involvement of India's biggest companies in the process of cabinet formation was the story that should have been headlined. Ms Radia talks of Sunil Mittal and AT&T using Times Now to push out stories about Dayanidhi Maran being the frontrunner for telecom and Mr. Raja being in disfavour. Her own strategy appears to have been to use her relationship with Barkha Dutt and Shankar Aiyar to get the opposite message out onto news channels like NDTV and Headlines Today.

Instead of using Ms Radia as a “source” for covering the DMK, her role, and the role of her principal clients, in trying to push for a minister who was seen even then as tainted ought to have been exposed. But then Delhi is a hothouse of power, and proximity to power deadens one's reflexes and weakens one's nerves. What Indian journalism needs more than anything else today is distance. From both politicians and industrialists. It is never too late to swallow that red pill.

My interview to a Chinese magazine on Obama's visit to India

2010-11-17T20:25:00.006+05:30

Sanlian LifeWeek, "one of the most widely circulated weekly magazines in China with 300,000 readers per week in more than 30 Chinese big cities" contacted me last week to get my views on the visit to India by US President Barack Obama.

According to the journalist who wrote to me, the magazine is published by Sanlian Publishing House, which was founded in the 1930s and is one of China's largest publishing houses of long history.

Since it is rare for an Indian journalist to speak to Chinese readers, however briefly, I was more than happy to provide my two fens worth!

I don't know how much of this they actually used in the published story but their questions and my full answers are below... (If any reader of this blog knows Chinese, I'll be happy to send them a PDF of the story which the magazine sent me)

Interview Questions

Question 1: Many Chinese analysts are less optimistic than India media about Obama's present visit. It is widely believed here while Obama gains economic benefits substantively from this trip, India only gets symbolic gesture from Obama’s supporting India's political ambition to become a permanent member of Security Council. Obama's trip is motivated by economic interest, while India expects political gains. How do you see this gap? How do you see what this trip has brought to the US and to India?

Varadarajan: The United States has three main objectives in developing closer relations with India and these were the focus of President Obama's visit.

The first is to gain economic benefits from commercial and military deals. This goal was only partially fulfilled. $10 billion worth of Indian commercial deals were announced but many of these were previously agreed. As for defence, the big contract for 126 fighter aircraft has yet to be decided between the US, French, Russian and European vendors. The second goal was to dispel the idea that the Obama administration was less committed to the strategic partnership than George W. Bush was. On this front, he was successful, particularly by making the announcement of support for an Indian permanent seat at a future, expanded UN Security Council, and by endorsing the Indian positions on terrorism and the need for a 'step by step' dialogue with Pakistan where easier issues are taken up first. The third goal was to encourage India to work closely with America in the East Asian region and help Washington better manage the uncertainties stemming from China's rise. On this front, he was only partially successful. The Indians are happy to expand their role in Asia and East Asia but are wary of doing so under the "leadership" of anyone, especially the Americans. Nor do they want to be seen as American "allies".

The Indian goals from the visit were also three-fold. First, to make a further dent in the high technology-denial regimes and complete the process started in 2005 with the Indo-US nuclear deal. On this front, India achieved some successes. Three of its companies were taken off the US Entities List, Obama promised that India would be treated the same as other American friends and a commitment was made to push for Indian membership of multilateral export control regimes like the NSG and the MTCR. The second goal was to achieve a better convergence of views on regional security issues, especially terrorism, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran. Here, India was only partially successful. Obama came away with a better understanding of India's concerns on terrorism emanating from Pakistan and also of the importance of India's role in Afghanistan. But the US President remains too trustful of the Pakistani military and too distrustful of diplomatic options with Iran, from the Indian point of view. The third goal was to win greater US acceptance of the global role that India aspires to play. This was met with success: the US endorsed India's candidature for a permanent Indian seat and also spoke of working together with India to have a dialogue with other states possessing nuclear weapons (such as Pakistan, China, Russia etc) on nuclear doctrines.

It is true that the promise of a UNSC seat is open-ended and, in a way, conditional on India playing the part of a "responsible stakeholder" from the American viewpoint. But Obama's endorsement will create space for India to push its cause more effectively.

Question 2: The New York Times analyzed Obama's Indian trip as a necessity to counter assertive China. One example in case is the large scale military deal with India. But to many Chinese analysts and experts, in real politics, this is not true. Do you think the U.S. and India take each other as a strategic democratic partner to counter China in Asia?

Varadarajan: It may be simplistic to characterise American policy towards Beijing as one of "countering China". Yes, the US is worried by what it sees as growing Chinese assertiveness. So are many countries in Asia, especially India, Viet Nam etc. The US also makes a lot of noise about the lack of transparency in Chinese defence policy and defence spending. In reality, the US is by far the strongest military power in the world and has been using its armed might in Asia for several decades, often with very negative consequences for the region (eg. Viet Nam war, Iraq war of 2003).

The US and Chinese economies are closely intertwined but this does not mean there is no strategic rivalry. Power for both the Chinese and the Americans means the same thing: no restriction on their own freedom of action and the ability to deny that complete freedom to others. During the Cold War and after, the US relied on a network of allies to project its power in Asia. Today, America itself may not be in decline but some of these allies, especially Japan, are in decline. The thrust of US policy over the past 15 years has been to build a new network of partnerships that can sustain American hegemonic interests in Asia. And Pentagon planners believe India has the potential to be the most important of such partners, given its military capability, democratic culture and regional and even global aspirations. To this end, the Pentagon has been encouraging arms sales and inter-operability with the Indian military and also been pushing for access to Indian bases.

The Indian side, however, is wary. They would like access to the latest American hardware and are keen to benefit from military exercises but they do not intend to serve as a junior partner in such a project. There is resistance within India to signing agreements like the Logisitcs Support Agreement and CISMOA. And while many Indians are wary of Chinese military power and feel the need to grow Indian capabilities as a counter or hedge, there is no support for a military gang-up with the US against China. Most see such a strategy as dangerous for the region.

Question 3: Historically, India holds an independent policy towards many issues and seldom follows the U.S. As some Indian scholars put, India has its own global strategy and is not interested in any kind of military alliance. What is your opinion? How do you see the U.S. and India’s divergence in issues like US’s AfPak policy and towards Iran, and more broadly, their Asian version?

Varadarajan: There are some in India who would like the country to work more closely on global issues with the United States but the overwhelming majority support an independent foreign policy. This means that just as there will be issues on which we will work with the US, there will also be issues where we will work closely with other countries and this may also mean taking stands and positions that run counter to what the US wants. We have seen this on the world trade talks issue (Doha round), as well as on the climate change issue. Even on Iran, the Indian position today is at variance with the American one. India does not believe sanctions and coercion are the way forward, for example.

Differences may also crop up on the question of Asian security architecture when it becomes clear that the US intends not to work as a partner of Asia and East Asia but seeks to lead and direct it. But here, it is important for Chinese readers to understand that hardline Chinese policies and attitudes, especially when it comes to territorial disputes and boundary questions, are making it easier for the American side to push its role and even "leadership" in Asia. The US would like nothing more than to be able to play on the insecurities and fears of China's neighbours.

India and Obama: Trading one hyphenation for another

2010-11-12T14:58:00.006+05:30

India may no longer be bracketed with Pakistan in American thinking but its hyphenation with China does not augur well for the relationship or the region...

12 November 2010
The Hindu

Trading one hyphen for another

Siddharth Varadarajan

Speaking to an audience of businessmen in New Delhi in May 2009, Robert D. Blackwill struck a dark and pessimistic tone about what the arrival of Barack Obama in the White House portended for India. As George W. Bush's ambassador, Mr. Blackwill had helped effect a major transformation of the bilateral relationship. But four months into the tenure of his successor, he was concerned that “there may be a substantial change under way in the quality and the intensity of U.S.-India relations.”

The main reason for this was the change in Washington's attitude towards Beijing. According to Mr. Blackwill, President Bush “based his transformation of U.S.-India relations on the core strategic principle of democratic India as a key factor in balancing the rise of Chinese power.” Going by early indications, however, “it is not clear that the Obama administration has the same preoccupation with the rise of Chinese power and India's balancing role in it.”

Ambassador Blackwill was not alone in reading the tea leaves that way. The world financial crisis had increased the clout of China and there was much breathless talk of ‘G-2', a new Sino-American compact to stabilise the global economy. “So China today appears, at least to me, to be on a substantially higher plane in U.S. diplomacy than India, which seems to have been downgraded in administration strategic calculations,” Mr. Blackwill noted. One consequence of this downgrading was the role the Obama administration appeared to encourage China to play in South Asia. The joint statement issued at the end of President Obama's visit to Beijing in November 2009 spoke about the two countries increasing their cooperation towards the goal of “bringing about more stable, peaceful relations in all of South Asia.” Not surprisingly, India saw red.

Twelve months later, however, the world seems to have spun around to the Bush axis again. The U.S. no longer harbours illusions about a G-2 in which China would play the role of a junior partner. Tension with Beijing has returned across a wide range of bilateral issues from currency and trade to naval deployment and maritime security. The past year has also seen a deterioration in China's relations with several Asian powers like India, Japan and Vietnam, with disputes flaring up over stapled visas for Kashmiri-domiciled Indians and disputed islands in the South China and East China seas. It is in this context that President Obama and his advisors seem to have rediscovered the importance of India.

In a triumph of strategic path-dependence over political fantasy, President Obama has returned to the baseline policy the United States has been following for the past decade. This is the policy of renewing alliances and creating “partnerships” in Asia so as to sustain American domination and leadership in a region that is otherwise increasingly being influenced by China's rise. And at the heart of this policy is encouraging India to get more involved in the East Asian economic and strategic space. “Today, the U.S. is once again playing a leadership role in Asia,” President Obama said in his speech to the joint session of Parliament earlier this week. [We] want India to not only “look East”, we want India to “engage East”…”

The crucial words here are the “leadership role” of the U.S. They provide the context for the increased engagement Mr. Obama wants to see as he exhorts India to go east. The Manmohan-Obama joint statement talks of the two leaders having a shared vision for peace, stability and prosperity in “Asia, the Indian Ocean region and the Pacific region.” They also speak of the need for an open, balanced and inclusive architecture in the region.

Without going into the merits or demerits of India looking and engaging the East under American “leadership,” the essentially derivative nature of the Indo-U.S. relationship needs underlining. What is common to the warming to India under Bush, the cooling in the initial months of the Obama administration, and the current warmth is, in a word, China. American attitudes towards Beijing appear to have become a better predictor of temperature on the Indo-U.S. front than anything intrinsic to the bilateral relationship. And that can't be a good thing.

The reality of this equation for Indo-U.S. cooperation in the strategic and military sphere is reinforced by some of the views collated by Bethany N. Danyluk and Juli A. MacDonald in The U.S.-India Defense Relationship: Reassessing Perceptions and Expectations, a report prepared for the Pentagon in November 2008. “If there were no China,” a U.S. Navy officer is quoted as saying in the unclassified report, “we would still engage [India], but maybe not to the same extent. There are plenty of opportunities for cooperation, but China drives a lot of what we are doing”.

The 2008 report, which updates a similar survey of American and Indian policymakers' attitudes that the Pentagon commissioned in 2002, provides a valuable insight into the other imperatives that also seem to be driving the American desire to have India look east. These include the expectation that India could relieve some of the regional security burdens currently borne by the U.S., with its overextended military commitments, and the idea that Washington ought to somehow leverage the relationships India has in the region to achieve mutual objectives “in places where the United States would like to maintain a lower profile.” According to one American official quoted: “The United States is trying to get out of the one-on-one hub-and-spoke mentality. We need to figure out where the United States injects itself effectively. Where it does not, it would be helpful to have India engage these actors horizontally.”

The picture that emerges, then, is a complex one in which American off-shore balancing is combined with the outsourcing of hegemonic responsibilities in East Asia.

The fact that the U.S. hopes to benefit from increased Indian engagement in East Asia can hardly be an argument against India looking east. But the hyphenation with China that the American policy towards India is predicated on should make us pause for thought. Though India — and even the U.S. — are not in the business of containing China, this explicit hyphenation of two major Asian powers in American public discourse creates unnecessary complications for New Delhi. For example, the Chinese attitude towards a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council for India may be outrightly hostile if Beijing concludes that Washington is being motivated by some crude notion of a balance of power in Asia. Of course, China may still be hostile in the absence of such a motive but it might reconcile itself to the rise of Indian power if it believes this power will not be used to hurt its legitimate core interests. Sending out such a signal is essential for India.

As India and China grow, they will inevitably rub up against each other in their respective backyards. India does not like the growing Chinese influence in South Asia any more than China will welcome India's increasing presence in East Asia. But when this presence comes bundled together with an American one, the mix can seem suffocating and lethal for both. Just as India reacted so negatively to America speaking of a Chinese role in South Asia, China is likely to be shell-shocked by the copious references to East Asia in the various speeches and statements that were made during Mr. Obama's recent visit to India. It may react by reaching out and playing catch up with a country it has unnerved with its statements on the border issue this past year. Or it may ratchet up the pressure. Or it may just wait and see whether Mr. Obama's domestic difficulties and changes in global dynamics push Washington into once again warming towards Beijing and cooling towards Delhi.

India's relationships with the U.S. and China will never be completely independent of each other but the challenge for Indian policymakers is to ensure each is free standing and independent of the pushes and pulls which occur between Washington and Beijing. The U.S. does not do partnerships. That is why Mr. Obama reminded Indian parliamentarians of the leadership role America is playing in Asia. But Asia doesn't need leaders and followers. So long as Washington insists on leading the show, the Asian architecture India and the U.S. speak about cannot be genuinely open, balanced and inclusive. As New Delhi slowly recovers from the Obama whirlwind, this is one message that needs to be internalised.

Obama's UNSC statement a boost but India to be on probation

2010-11-09T15:51:00.001+05:30

“[In] the years ahead,” the American President told Parliament on Monday, “I look forward to a reformed U.N. Security Council that includes India as a permanent member.” ... My news analysis ...

9 November 2010
The Hindu

Obama's UNSC statement a boost but India to be on probation

Siddharth Varadarajan

New Delhi: Barack Obama's endorsement of a permanent seat for India in a reformed U.N. Security Council represents a significant evolution of American policy towards both India and the world body.

“[In] the years ahead,” the American President told Parliament on Monday, “I look forward to a reformed U.N. Security Council that includes India as a permanent member.”

Led by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, the members of Parliament burst into thunderous applause when they heard those magic words. And yet, the absence of a timeline, Mr. Obama's use of passive voice and his caveat on India's “increased responsibility” all suggest that the U.S. expects India to bat for pet American causes in order to fully earn a seat at the global high table.

In July, senior American officials accompanying General Jim Jones, who was Mr. Obama's National Security Adviser at the time, told members of the Indian strategic community at an informal interaction that any decision to endorse India as a permanent member of the UNSC would depend on “our assessment of the extent to which India is likely to play a responsible role [there].”

Among the areas where President Obama expects India to demonstrate responsibility are sanctions on Iran and democracy and human rights promotion in places like Myanmar. If his exhortations left MPs unimpressed, this was not because anyone in the House supports a nuclear-armed Iran or the generals in Nay Pyi Taw. Rather, it was because of the double standards involved in the formulation of this checklist.

And yet, it would be churlish to deny the step forward that Mr. Obama has taken in signalling his support for an Indian permanent seat. Even if he has essentially handed the Indians a cheque that cannot easily be cashed, the U.S. President's words will strengthen India's hand as it seeks to press for reform of the U.N.

Until now, Washington had spoken only of a “criteria-based approach” to the selection of potential members of a reformed and expanded Security Council. In 2005, the U.S. said it “unambiguously supports a permanent seat for Japan” in the UNSC but the furthest it was prepared to go on India was this vague promise made by Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs William Burns earlier this year: “We're open to expansion of permanent membership of the Council and we believe India's going to have a central part to play in the consideration that's going to come.”

This endorsement is less fulsome than what the U.S. has given the Japanese but the political impact of Mr. Obama's statement in other capitals around the world will be enormous. Russia, which has slowly backed away from its earlier unqualified support for India, will now come under pressure to abandon its insistence on “consensus” as a precondition for UNSC reform. That will leave the Chinese — who have not gone beyond stating their “understanding” of India's desire to play a greater role in world affairs, including at the U.N. — as the last among the five current permanent members to fully reveal their hand.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has often noted that the P-5 will not give up the powers they currently enjoy. Even a dilution of power would be unpalatable to them. The U.S. knows the P-5 will never lose their veto power and that any new permanent member will have to come in without the veto. What Mr. Obama is proposing, therefore, is not the dilution of power but its diffusion, that too over an unspecified time frame and with the unstated advisory that India would be on probation till the as-yet undefined process of expansion is complete.
Challenge to leadership

Dr. Singh is right in welcoming Mr. Obama's long-term affirmation of India's place in a reformed UNSC. But the challenge to the Indian leadership is in reconciling the political price Washington will demand for supporting its candidature with the expectation most U.N. members have from India's independent line in foreign policy and global security matters. If that independence flags, the world may see little merit in giving India a seat around the horseshoe table at Turtle Bay. But if that independence is asserted, a future American President may quietly drop Mr. Obama's less-than-ringing endorsement.

In a first, India, U.S. for dialogue of all nuclear weapon states

2010-11-09T15:48:00.000+05:30

At stake, a symbolic erasure of the distincion between NPT-recognised nuclear weapon states and NWSs outside the treaty...

9 November 2010
The Hindu

In a first, India, U.S. for dialogue of all nuclear weapon states

Siddharth Varadarajan

New Delhi: The United States has become the first nuclear weapons state (NWS) as defined by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to endorse the idea of talks between the five NWSs and the three nuclear-armed nations outside the NPT, i.e. India, Pakistan and Israel.

In their joint statement issued on Monday, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and U.S. President Barack Obama “affirmed the need for a meaningful dialogue among all states possessing nuclear weapons to build trust and confidence and for reducing the salience of nuclear weapons in international affairs and security doctrines.”

The statement adds: “They support strengthening the six decade-old international norm of non-use of nuclear weapons.”

Until now, the U.S. has remained firmly wedded to the NPT framework and structures — or to bilateral forums with other NWSs like Russia — for all dialogues related to nuclear weapons. Others like China have also been reluctant to engage in any discussion with India on nuclear strategic issues such as no first use, risk reduction and confidence-building measures.

What Mr. Obama and Dr. Singh envisage, however, is a framework which will bring all eight countries possessing nuclear weapons together for a dialogue on building trust and confidence, a major step in the direction of harmonising the NPT, which the three outsiders will never sign, with the wider aim of “universal and non-discriminatory global nuclear disarmament in the 21st century.”

In doing so, India and the U.S. have assembled the basic building blocks of a framework which has the potential to transcend the NPT, while remaining faithful to the twin goals of non-proliferation and the elimination of nuclear weapons.

The joint statement also says the U.S. intends to support India's full membership in the Nuclear Suppliers Group and Missile Technology Control Regime in a phased manner “and to consult with regime members to encourage the evolution of regime membership criteria, consistent with maintaining the core principles of these regimes,” as the Indian government simultaneously moves ahead with coming into conformity with these regimes' export control requirements.

The Hindu has learned that in the course of the negotiations, the U.S. side confirmed to India that NPT membership would not be one of criteria for India's membership. Moreover, a commitment to this effect was read into the official records.

India, which is pushing for an international no first use agreement and a Nuclear Weapons Convention outlawing atomic arms, considers its position on doctrinal issues to be far ahead of that of the U.S. Although the Obama administration has spoken of reducing the salience of nuclear weapons in its military doctrine in the latest Nuclear Posture Review, this is the first time the U.S. is committing itself to a dialogue on the issue with all other countries possessing nuclear weapons.

Manmohan's dinner diplomacy a hit with Obama

2010-11-08T15:42:00.001+05:30

In which the Obamas get to find out who's who in Delhi ...

8 November 2010
The Hindu

Manmohan's dinner diplomacy a hit with Obama

Siddharth Varadarajan

Any doubts Barack Obama might have had about the political pecking order in India is likely to have been settled by the seating arrangement at the private dinner Prime Minister Manmohan Singh threw for the visiting U.S. President at his residence on Race Course Road on Sunday night.

The 50 Indian and 20 American invitees were sprinkled across 10 tables arranged under a high-domed, open tent on the lawns just outside the bungalow once known as “7 RCR” that serves as the Prime Minister's residential camp office.

Among the high-profile invitees were Ministers, politicians, film stars, captains of industry, bureaucrats and the odd academic, environmentalist and even journalist. And at the head table, alongside the two principals and their spouses, pride of place was given to three politicians whose importance for the current and future state of the government is just a notch below that of Dr. Singh: Congress president Sonia Gandhi, Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee and the member of Parliament from Amethi, Rahul Gandhi.

If Ms. Gandhi's place at the high table needs no explanation or comment, Mr. Mukherjee's presence there — especially when his American counterpart, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, was seated elsewhere — sent a clear message about his status as the primus inter pares of senior Ministers, several of whom (S.M. Krishna, A.K. Antony, P. Chidambaram) were also present at the dinner . As for Mr. Gandhi's slot on the high table, Mr. Obama could be forgiven for thinking this was part of some sort of grooming exercise. If I win a second term as U.S. President, he must surely have asked himself, is this the man I might be dealing with in India in 2014?

Whatever the future portends, however, Mr. Obama knows Dr. Singh is the man who calls the shots on the bilateral front for now. The two leaders spent nearly an hour closeted together in a meeting without aides or note-takers, giving the assembled guests a chance to freely mingle over endless glasses of pomegranate and mousambi juice. What they discussed is not known. Shortly after 8 p.m., everyone was asked to get into a U-shaped line by the SPG chief, B.V. Wanchoo. The Prime Minister and the U.S. President then walked in with their spouses. Mr. and Mrs. Obama proceeded to shake hands and exchange a few words with each of those present.

No one from the Left parties appears to have been invited. But the Prime Minister did invite Arun Jaitley and L.K. Advani from the Bharatiya Janata Party, as well as the former National Security Adviser, Brajesh Mishra. The other Ministers present were Sharad Pawar, Kapil Sibal, Salman Khursheed, Anand Sharma and Prithviraj Chavan.

The tables at which guests were seated were named after prominent Indian-Americans or American individuals with a strong India link like Dalip Singh Saund (the first and only Indian to be elected to the U.S. Congress) and Norman Borlaug of the Green Revolution. Live entertainment was provided by the Navy band and the BSF's camel band.

Apart from Mr. Gandhi, the Prime Minister invited several young MPs to the dinner including Meenakshi Natarajan, Priya Dutt, Harsimrat Kaur and Kanimozhi. The Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir, Omar Abdullah, suggested Mr. Obama take the time to visit his State, an invitation the U.S. President said he would take up when he was able to find time to travel a bit more in the region. Among the film personalities present were Aamir Khan and Shabana Azmi. Chess wizard Viswanathan Anand was also there, as were atomic energy stalwarts Anil Kakodkar and Srikumar Banerjee. The industrialists present included Anu Agha of Thermax, Ratan Tata, Azim Premji, Swati Piramal and N.R. Narayana Murthy. Top bureaucrats included National Security Adviser Shivshankar Menon, Principal Secretary to Prime Minister T.K.A. Nair, Cabinet Secretary K.M. Chandrasekhar, Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao, Media Adviser to Prime Minister Harish Khare and Culture Secretary Jawhar Sircar.

U.S., India ‘constructing paradigm beyond the NPT'

2010-11-07T15:38:00.000+05:30

America has decided to support India's membership in the NSG, the Missile Technology Control Regime, the Australian Group and the Wassenaar Arrangement ...

7 November 2010
The Hindu

U.S., India ‘constructing paradigm beyond the NPT'

Siddharth Varadarajan

In committing itself to supporting India's full membership in the Nuclear Suppliers Group and other multilateral export control regimes, the Obama administration has finally opened a door for the country to transcend the legal confines of a treaty that has defined global attitudes towards nuclear weapons for over four decades: the NPT.

The American decision to support India's membership in the NSG, the Missile Technology Control Regime, the Australian Group and the Wassenaar Arrangement was made public on Saturday by Deputy National Security Adviser Mike Froman and is conditional on these clubs deciding, by consensus, to change their rules on who can join.

“As the membership criteria of these four regimes evolve,” said Mr. Froman, “we intend to support India's full membership in them. And at the same time, India will take steps to fully adopt the regime's export control requirements to reflect its prospective membership.”

The current membership rules of the NSG, though not formally stated, require adherence to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty or a regional nuclear weapons free zone (which in turn requires NPT membership). And the same treaty requirement applies in the case of the MTCR and the Wassenaar Arrangement — a cartel of 40 states which governs the export of conventional weapons and dual-use goods and technologies. But Mr. Froman said the U.S. would “encourage the evolution of a membership criteria of these regimes consistent with maintaining their core principles.”

Asked how the United States and India hoped to square the circle of compulsory membership of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty that the NSG and other cartels insist on, a senior Indian official told The Hindu: “We are constructing a paradigm beyond the NPT.”

Though President Barack Obama and his senior officials had upset India over the past year by signing on to calls at the United Nations and elsewhere for the universality of the NPT, Washington is acutely aware that India's accession to a treaty which would require it to give up its nuclear weapons is an impossibility. It is in this light that Mr. Froman's reference to new membership criteria acquires enormous significance.

The Bush administration's initiatives from 2005 to 2008 saw the U.S. helping to peel away export restrictions that were never originally a part of the NPT itself. That is why the NSG was able to give India an exemption from its export restrictions without getting into the trickier issue of what India's legal status in relation to the treaty actually was. But with NSG membership essentially tied to the NPT, any new joining criteria will effectively establish for nuclear-armed India — in clearer legal terms than anything else so far has done — a parallel status equivalent to that of the five nuclear weapons states which are part of the NPT.

Apart from easing Indian access to sensitive high technology items, membership of these clubs — “which will come in a phased manner” — will give New Delhi a say in their rule-making process. Under the terms of the NSG's 2008 waiver, India is today in the anomalous position of being obligated to abide by future guidelines that NSG and even MTCR members may adopt without being part of their formal decision-making process.

The MTCR deals the export of missiles with a range greater than 300 kilometres while the Australian Group regulates the export of materials that could be used for manufacturing chemical and biological weapons.

A partnership built on flawed assumptions

2010-11-05T15:09:00.001+05:30

If the big ticket arms and nuclear purchases the U.S. expects India to make do not materialise, much of the warmth in the relationship will evaporate...

5 November 2010
The Hindu

A partnership built on flawed assumptions

Siddharth Varadarajan

For all its appeals to “shared values” like democracy as a counter to China, the United States has not fully understood the meaning and significance of Democratic India's emergence as a global player.

At one level, this is hardly surprising. The U.S. itself developed a full-blown capitalist system and rose to global pre-eminence at a time when a large section of its population did not have the right to vote. The same is true of Great Britain and Japan and Europe. In the post-World War II period, countries which registered the greatest success in establishing a free market system tended not to be democratic. If capitalism and multi-party democracy come as a package in many countries today, it is capitalism which got off the starting block first in virtually all of them, leaving its imprint on democracy.

India's ruling class, on the other hand, was handicapped by the need to harmonise in real time the anti-democratic consequences of a market-based economy with the procedural and substantial requirements of a democratic polity. Of course, economic elites have had the greatest influence in policymaking but their power has always been contested. As a result, universal adult suffrage — and the wider deliberative process that comes along with it — has had more of an impact on the development of capitalism in India than in the rest of the “free world”. Unsurprisingly, the country's global outlook has also been tempered by this aspect of its polity.

The U.S. sees the macro growth data and has a fair idea of where India will be in economic terms two decades from now. It sees the rise and wants to get in at the ground floor. This was the meaning behind the gratuitous promise, made during the presidency of George W. Bush, of helping India emerge as a world power. But India is not in need of that “help”. Its rulers have their own global ambitions and they are not interested in becoming a client state or even a military ally or partner. Those are the two kinds of relationships the United States is used to having with countries around the world. That is why early signs that India will play the power game differently have been greeted in Washington with bewilderment, consternation and even anger.

In the countdown to President Barack Obama's visit to India, American officials have expressed their frustration over the new nuclear liability law. They are also upset with India's reluctance to sign “foundational” defence agreements like the Logistics Support Agreement (LSA) and the Communication and Information Security Memorandum of Agreement (CISMOA). Having done the heavy lifting at the Nuclear Suppliers Group to win an exemption for India from the cartel's export ban in 2008, the U.S. fears its own companies may not be able to benefit from the multi-billion dollar Indian nuclear market. Westinghouse and GE are squeamish about selling their reactors because the new Indian law opens a door for them to be held liable in the event of an accident caused by defective equipment. The executive branch may have wanted a more lenient law but Parliament thought otherwise. Despite this, the American side is looking for ways to undo the legislation.

If the Indian liability law goes beyond the international norm in insisting that suppliers too shoulder a part of the risk involved in the nuclear power generation business, this is because India is the first democracy to go in for a massive expansion of nuclear capacity in recent years. If the U.S. administration is unable to appreciate the sensitivity of the question in a country which experienced the Bhopal disaster, it could at least look at how the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has forced a rethink of liability limits in the United States. Instead, suggestions are being made that the Indian nuclear operator contractually take on the entire liability burden of its supplier even when an accident is traced back to faulty equipment. The end result of this pressure, of course, is that Parliament is likely to demand the right to scrutinise any reference to liability in the commercial contracts the Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited (NPCIL) signs with American vendors.

On the defence side, the LSA and CISMOA aim to boost interoperability between the Indian and American militaries, and pave the way for more arms sales from the U.S. Washington has both commercial and strategic reasons for developing a close military-to-military relationship with India. Billions of dollars of business and thousands of American jobs are riding on the weapons choices India will make over the next few years. But the U.S. is also keen to use its intimacy with the Indian armed forces to outsource low-end operations in the region, particularly in disaster management and counter-piracy.

India, on the other hand, is reluctant to sign these agreements because it is wary of the wider strategic implications. The U.S. has been an expeditionary and even belligerent power in Asia and though the Indian government supports the American war in Afghanistan, the 2003 invasion of Iraq had disastrous consequences throughout the region. With many in Washington speaking of a looming confrontation with Iran over the nuclear issue — a confrontation that would make the Iraq war look like a tea party — why should India do anything to facilitate American military deployment in the region?

Confronted with the Indian refusal to sign on the dotted line, American officials say the LSA and CISMOA texts on offer are identical to what dozens of countries have had no problem signing. In making this argument, the U.S. forgets that India is not an ally or a subordinate partner. Washington cannot hope to simply replicate the way it does business with Australia or Japan. Even if there are sections of the Indian establishment that would like to go along with these agreements, the political implications are far too complicated. This is a reality the U.S. will have to live with.

One test of the Indo-U.S. “strategic partnership” will be if it is able to survive an Indian refusal to spend billions of dollars on American military hardware. Though the technologies on offer seem tempting, India needs to proceed with caution given the end-use restrictions and the ban on modifications that America has imposed on all weapons it sells. Given the fickleness of the U.S. political system and the almost whimsical way in which technology and supply restrictions are imposed and lifted, India will place itself at risk by getting too dependent on American supplies for major weapon systems.

While the “unreliability” of the Americans is not in dispute, there are some in India who see this as a small price to pay in order to buy U.S. support against the “unpredictability” of the Chinese. It is true that the increasing assertiveness of China has rung alarm bells in many parts of Asia and that New Delhi needs to develop an effective strategy to manage what is likely to be an increasing complex relationship with Beijing. The White House has made much of the fact that Mr. Obama's visit to India will be followed immediately by visits to three other Asian democracies — Indonesia, South Korea and Japan. “There is a message in this to China,” a senior U.S. official said in Delhi last month. After fantasising in 2009 about a joint condominium with Beijing, Washington today appears slowly to be moving to the other extreme. In a few years time, it will be ready to move right back. It is essential that India have excellent relations with the United States. But these relations have to be free-standing, built with all the confidence that a rising, democratic power can muster, our eyes looking forward rather than sideways at the constant swings of an American pendulum.

India signs nuclear liability treaty

2010-10-28T15:32:00.002+05:30

Indian officials hope U.S. will now ease up on its pressure ...

28 October 2010
The Hindu

India signs nuclear liability treaty

Siddharth Varadarajan

New Delhi: India on Wednesday signed the Convention on Supplementary Compensation for Nuclear Damage (CSC), thereby delivering on the last of its commitments stemming from the landmark 2005 nuclear agreement with the United States.

The international covenant — which provides a framework for channelling liability and providing speedy compensation in the event of a nuclear accident — was signed at the International Atomic Energy Agency offices in Vienna by Dinkar Khullar, India's Ambassador to Austria. The IAEA is the “depository” of the CSC, which has so far been signed by 14 countries and ratified by four, including the U.S.

The CSC will enter into force only when at least five countries with a minimum of 4,00,000 units of installed nuclear capacity ratify the treaty. Even if India ratifies it — and Indian officials say this is unlikely to happen soon — the CSC will not enter into force unless at least one or two countries with a large civilian nuclear programme also do so.

With India signing the CSC and the Obama administration issuing the requisite ‘Part 810' licensing certifications, the stage is now set for the Nuclear Power Corporation of India Ltd. to begin full-fledged commercial negotiations with General Electric and Westinghouse for supply of two 1,000-MWe reactors. Three rounds of discussions have already been held, Indian officials say, but these have largely been exploratory in nature.

India promised the U.S. in 2008 that it would sign the CSC, a treaty that requires signatories to pass a domestic liability law in conformity with a model text. Washington's aim was to ensure that its companies were legally exempted from any liability burden in the event of an accident occurring in an American-supplied nuclear reactor.

Though India passed its liability law last month, the U.S. has objected to Sections 17(b) and 46 of the Act which open the door for legal action against nuclear suppliers if an accident is caused by faulty or defective equipment. Washington says these provisions violate the CSC, a charge New Delhi rejects.

With GE and Westinghouse lobbyists up in arms, the U.S. side initially suggested that the Manmohan Singh government find a way to delete or negate the two offending sections. When the impossibility of this was pointed out, they suggested that NPCIL be asked contractually to accept the entire liability burden of its suppliers in the event of an accident. This suggestion has also been vetoed.

Leaving aside the explosive political implications of a public sector company granting a free pass to an American supplier, legal advisers have pointed out that neither NPCIL nor the government can sign away the provisions for tortious and criminal liability that have been embedded in the new law.

Now that the CSC has been signed, Indian officials hope the U.S. will ease up on its pressure. “We have delivered on all our commitments. Now there is nothing which stands in the way of American companies having commercial negotiations for the sale of their reactors,” a senior official said.

The CSC provides no forum for signatories to challenge each other's national laws. Article XVI allows for arbitration as well as adjudication by the International Court of Justice, in the event of a dispute. But the U.S. entered a reservation while ratifying the Convention in 2008 declaring “that it does not consider itself bound by [these] dispute settlement procedures.” When it eventually ratifies the treaty, India is likely to make a similar declaration.

That would leave the Supreme Court of India as the only forum competent to rule on the compatibility of the Civil Liability for Nuclear Damages Act, 2010 with India's international obligations stemming from its accession to the CSC.

What India can bring to the high table

2010-10-14T19:55:00.001+05:30

The U.N. Security Council needs a strong and independent voice on the burning issues of our time, not some feeble echo of a stale Western chorus...

14 October 2010
The Hindu

What India can bring to the high table

Siddharth Varadarajan

At an informal interaction with members of the Indian strategic community during the visit to New Delhi of General James Jones in July, an American official asked whether there was any decision the Obama administration could take that would be as ‘totemic' for the bilateral relationship as the Bush administration's July 2005 offer of a nuclear deal had been.

When it was suggested that an endorsement of India's candidature for a permanent seat in a reformed United Nations Security Council might arguably fit the bill, one official said the question was indeed being studied actively in Washington as part of the preparatory work for President Barack Obama's November visit. “But any decision will likely depend on our assessment of the extent to which India is likely to play a responsible role as a permanent member”.

I was reminded of that conversation when External Affairs Minister S.M. Krishna told journalists on Wednesday that India's election as a non-permanent member of the UNSC with the support of 187 of the world body's 192 member states provided an opportunity for the country to “establish its credentials and credibility in handling issues which come up with a degree of responsibility.”

The key question, of course, is the metric one uses to measure “responsibility”. As the principal empowered organ of the U.N. system, the Security Council deals with questions of international security that are often intensely political. During the Cold War, the rivalry between the United States and the former Soviet Union meant the biggest questions of war and peace tended to be settled far away from the horse-shoe table around which the 15 members of the UNSC sat. But ever since the end of the bipolar division of the world, the work of the Security Council has undergone a quantitative and qualitative transformation. Consider this statistic. Prior to 1990, the total number of resolutions passed by it over 45 years was 646. In the 20 years since then, however, a total of 1295 resolutions have been passed, the last being No. 1942 of September 29, 2010, authorising a temporary increase in the military and police personnel contingents of UNOCI, the United Nations Operation in Côte d'Ivoire.

India, incidentally, has sent soldiers for that operation and has historically been one of the top contributors to U.N. peacekeeping efforts around the world. Much of the UNSC's expanded docket has to do with the increase in peacekeeping responsibilities, the discharge of which is mostly without major controversy. But political considerations come into play on issues where the United States and its allies, especially Israel, or other big powers, have their own stake and want the Security Council to take a decision on a particular course of action. It is on these sorts of questions that India's performance as a “responsible stakeholder” in the international system will likely be tested.

Consider an example. In June this year, Brazil and Turkey, both non-permanent members of the Security Council, voted against a resolution imposing new sanctions on Tehran. Both countries had just helped to broker a crucial agreement under which Iran would have sent out a considerable part of its low-enriched uranium stock in exchange for the eventual supply of medical-grade enriched uranium for use in a research reactor. That agreement might well have served as a first step in the process of building confidence and trust between Iran and the West but the U.S. went out of its way to scuttle those prospects by insisting on the imposition of new punitive sanctions.

In the eyes of many if not most countries, Brazil and Turkey acted highly responsibly by voting against the sanctions resolution and insisting that the U.N. pursue the path of diplomacy and compromise rather than confrontation and coercion. How might India have voted had it been on the Security Council this summer? Would it have voted against, like Ankara and Brasilia? Or abstained, like Lebanon? Or voted for the resolution, like the remaining 12? Around the time the issue was being discussed, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and senior Indian officials had said on the record that India did not believe the imposition of sanctions would help resolve anything. Having helped to send the Iran file to New York by voting with the United States at the International Atomic Energy Agency in 2005 and 2006, India now realises the Security Council has not played a particularly useful role in finding a peaceful solution to the problem. But it is one thing to criticise sanctions in abstract and another to cast a negative ballot at the Security Council. When such a situation arises again, as it surely will in the next two years, there will be no shortage of pundits in India who will argue that New Delhi has more to gain by siding with the U.S. than by sticking to its position. “There is no way we can become a permanent member if we antagonise Washington”, we will be told, so let us use our non-permanent seat to demonstrate how “responsible” we really are.

The problem, of course, is that whatever Washington's expectations might be, the rest of the world values India precisely because of its ability to reason for itself and stick to its own positions. If the non-permanent seat India has just won is indeed to become a stepping stone for a permanent seat, the Manmohan Singh government will have to focus less on convincing the U.S. about how “responsible” it can be. It should instead work hard to demonstrate how a restructured Security Council built around the inclusion of rising powers like itself, Brazil and South Africa stands a better chance of solving the world's problems than the present outdated arrangement. Fortuitously, all three IBSA countries will be on the UNSC at the same time, as will the BRIC group.

Even as its salience in international affairs has increased, the UNSC has been singularly unsuccessful in dealing with new and emerging crises like terrorism and piracy or resolving existing problems like the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestinian and Syrian territory. For 13 long years, the Security Council remained seized of the Iraq file and maintained sanctions over that unfortunate country; and then, when the U.S. defied its mandate by illegally invading and occupying Iraq, it remained a mute and powerless spectator. There is a structural problem with the Council which runs must deeper than the existence of veto power in the hands of the P-5. Today, despite the growing American ability to mobilise all permanent members behind its initiatives, as in the case of Iran and even North Korea, the UNSC has not managed to make much headway because it is unrepresentative and because the solutions it proposes lack credibility.

At the end of the day, this is the strongest argument India and other aspirants for permanent seats can make. This will mean conceiving of, and pushing for, innovative approaches to the world's major problems, even if this rubs the United States or any other power the wrong way. Yes, any of the P-5 can veto the General Assembly's eventual recommendations for permanent membership as and when these emerge from the text-based negotiations now underway in New York. The U.S., for example, may well decide that an independent-minded India will not be an asset on an expanded Security Council. But if it were to ever take the extreme step of vetoing India's candidature, it would also have to then deal with the diplomatic, political and economic consequences of such an act.

Force of faith trumps law and reason in Ayodhya case

2010-10-01T01:25:00.004+05:30

Legal, social and political repercussions likely to be damaging ...

1 October 2010
The Hindu

NEWS ANALYSIS

Force of faith trumps law and reason in Ayodhya case
Legal, social and political repercussions likely to be damaging

Siddharth Varadarajan

New Delhi: The Lucknow Bench of the Allahabad High Court has made judicial history by deciding a long pending legal dispute over a piece of property in Ayodhya on the basis of an unverified and unsubstantiated reference to the “faith and belief of Hindus”.

The irony is that in doing so, the court has inadvertently provided a shot in the arm to a political movement that cited the very same “faith” and “belief” to justify its open defiance of the law and the Indian Constitution. That defiance reached its apogee in 1992, when a 500-year old mosque which stood at the disputed site was destroyed. The legal and political system in India stood silent witness to that crime of trespass, vandalism and expropriation. Eighteen years later, the country has compounded that sin by legitimising the “faith” and “belief” of those who took the law into their own hands.

The three learned judges of the Allahabad High Court may have rendered separate judgments on the title suit in the Babri Masjid-Ramjanmabhoomi case but Justices Sudhir Agarwal, S.U. Khan and Dharam Veer Sharma all seem to agree on one central point: that the Hindu plaintiffs in the case have a claim to the disputed site because “as per [the] faith and belief of the Hindus” the place under the central dome of the Babri Masjid where the idols of Ram Lalla were placed surreptitiously in 1949 is indeed the “birthplace” of Lord Ram.

For every Hindu who believes the spot under the central dome of the Babri Masjid is the precise spot where Lord Ram was born there is another who believes something else. But leaving aside the question of who “the Hindus” referred to by the court really are and how their actual faith and belief was ascertained and measured, it is odd that a court of law should give such weight to theological considerations and constructs rather than legal reasoning and facts. Tulsidas wrote his Ramcharitmanas in 16th century Ayodhya but made no reference to the birthplace of Lord Rama that the court has now identified with such exacting precision five centuries later.

The “faith and belief” that the court speaks about today acquired salience only after the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and Bharatiya Janata Party launched a political campaign in the 1980s to “liberate” the “janmasthan”.

Collectives in India have faith in all sorts of things but “faith” cannot become the arbiter for what is right and wrong in law. Nor can the righting of supposed historical wrongs become the basis for dispensing justice today. In 1993, the Supreme Court wisely refused to answer a Presidential Reference made to it by the Narasimha Rao government seeking its opinion on whether a Hindu temple once existed at the Babri Masjid site. Yet, the High Court saw fit to frame a number of questions that ought to have had absolutely no bearing on the title suit which was before it.

One of the questions the court framed was “whether the building has been constructed on the site of an alleged Hindu temple after demolishing the same”. Pursuant to this question, it asked the Archaeological Survey of India to conduct a dig at the site. This was done in 2003, during the time when the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance government was in power at the Centre. Not surprisingly, the ASI concluded that there was a “massive Hindu religious structure” below, a finding that was disputed by many archaeologists and historians.

The territory of India – as of many countries with a settled civilisation as old as ours – is full of buildings that were constructed after pre-existing structures were demolished to make for them. Buddhist shrines made way for Hindu temples. Temples have made way for mosques. Mosques have made way for temples. So even if a temple was demolished in the 16th century to make way for the Babri Masjid, what legal relevance can that have in the 21st century? And if such demolition is to serve as the basis for settling property disputes today, where do we draw the line? On the walls of the Gyanvapi mosque in Varanasi can be seen the remnants of a Hindu temple, perhaps even of the original Vishwanath mandir. Certainly many “Hindus” believe the mosque is built on land that is especially sacred to them. The denouement of the Babri case from agitation and demolition to possession might easily serve as a precedent for politicians looking to come to power on the basis of heightening religious tensions.

Even assuming the tainted ASI report is correct in its assessment that a Hindu temple lay below the ruins of Babri Masjid, neither the ASI nor any other expert has any scientific basis for claiming the architects of the mosque were the ones who did the demolishing. And yet two of the three High Court judges have concluded that the mosque was built after a temple was demolished.

From at least the 19th century if not earlier, we know that both Hindus and Muslims worshipped within the 2.77 acre site, the latter within the Babri Masjid building and the former at the Ram Chhabutra built within the mosque compound. This practice came to an end in 1949 when politically motivated individuals broke into the mosque and placed idols of Ram Lalla within. After 1949, both communities were denied access though Hindus have been allowed to offer darshan since 1986. In suggesting a three way partition of the site, the High Court has taken a small step towards the restoration of the religious status quo ante which prevailed before politicians got into the act. But its reasoning is flawed and even dangerous. If left unamended by the Supreme Court, the legal, social and political repercussions of the judgment are likely to be extremely damaging.

Such journalists should be exposed, not honoured

2010-09-06T18:42:00.001+05:30

I have written to the jury which gave the Indian News Broadcasting Award for News Reporter of the Year 2010, Hindi, to Neeta Sharma of NDTV India, protesting their choice.

Neeta Sharma was the reporter who wrote a false story in the Hindustan Times in 2002 calling Iftikhar Gilani, a senior and respected journalist who is the Delhi bureau chief of Kashmir Times, an ISI agent. Her story, which was based on a plant by police and intelligence officials, contributed to Iftikhar's incarceration and caused him no end of trouble, especially with violent inmates and jailors at Tihar. As a reporter, she has never apologised for her story. Until she does so, I consider her a blight on my profession. I am sickened by the thought that such a person could have received an award for her so-called reporting. My letter -- and all the details of that sordid incident -- is appended below ...

Dear Vinod [Mehta] and other jury members,

You were part of a jury that recently gave Neeta Sharma of NDTV India a 'reporter of the year' award.

While I am not familiar with her work on TV, her earlier work as a reporter for HT was reprehensible. Indeed, I have no hesitation in saying she was a blot on the profession of journalism. And that until she makes amends by tendering an unqualified apology to the biggest victim of her unprofessionalism -- Iftikhar Gilani -- she ought to be considered beyond the pale.

While at the HT, she was an accomplice in the police attempt to frame Iftikhar Gilani, the respected bureau chief of Kashmir Times on false charges. I have recorded the issue and circumstances of Neeta Sharma's unethical behaviour in my Introduction to Gilani's book, My Days in Prison, which was published by Penguin in 2005:

Since the DGMI ‘opinion’ made no reference to the published document, Iftikhar’s counsel tried in vain to have the courts take cognisance of it and demand that the military provide a second opinion expeditiously. Here, the case hit its third and fourth roadblocks, which was the timorousness of the lower judiciary and media in matters ostensibly relating to national security and official secrets. What was surprising was that despite the alacrity of the courts in filing contempt proceedings against those who try to manipulate the course of justice by misreporting or misrepresenting what transpires during a hearing, the concerned judge took no action against a wholly fabricated news report which appeared in a national daily the first time Iftikhar was produced in court: “In the course of hearing on Monday, Geelani (sic) reportedly said he had been passing on classified information about the movement of Indian troops to the ISI. When chief metropolitan magistrate Sangita Sehgal asked him if she should record this in his statement, Geelani nodded in assent.”[1] The news was false and amounted to contempt of court. Yet, no action was taken.

As for the gullible crime reporter who was fed this story by the Delhi Police Special Cell, no apology was ever made. I happened to be introduced to the reporter in question at a colleague’s wedding in 2004 and when I said I had a bone to pick with her because of the hit-job she had done on Iftikhar Gilani, she said, “I don’t know any Iftikhar Gilani”. I was angry but decided to give her a bit of advice: “The police officials who used you to plant that story have escaped with their reputations intact. But what you did will remain a blot on your reputation as a journalist so long as you don’t apologise to Iftikhar”.

Neeta Sharma’s story was important to the police because it appeared just at a time when a petition drafted by Aunohita Mojumdar and other journalists and friends of Iftikhar was gathering steam. A brief report about the campaign had appeared in The Times of India on June 10 and the police and IB quickly realised the need to nip any journalistic acts of solidarity in the bud. Editors could be leaned upon (and they were) but there was no better deterrent to the campaigning spirit than a concocted confession by Iftikhar that he had been an ISI agent all along. Soon, the floodgates opened and any number of malicious reports appeared across much of the Indian media accusing Iftikhar of being a traitor and militant, smuggler and jihadi, a sex fiend and “spy claiming the privileges of a newsman”, in the libellous words of the Bharatiya Janata Party MP and one-time journalist, Balbir K. Punj.[2]

[1] Neeta Sharma, ‘Iftikar Geelani admits ISI links’, Hindustan Times, June 11, 2002 [2] Balbir K. Punj, ‘Dissimulation in words and in images’, Outlook, July 8, 2002
http://svaradarajan.blogspot.com/2005/02/my-foreword-to-iftikhar-gilanis-my.html

Iftikhar has also spoken about this in interviews and elsewhere:

But what really affected my family and me most was a was a four column story printed in Hindustan Times on June 11 saying I was an ISI agent. It was a by-lined report by Neeta Sharma. Surprisingly, the reporter quoted me saying that I had confessed to being an agent, and to my illegal activities when I was appearing at one of the hearings at the sessions court. Later a police official asked me whether I had spoken to any reporter which I had denied.

This really hurt my family and me. The next day my wife went to speak and complain to Shobhana Bhartia, Executive and Editorial Director of HT and told her all this was untrue and they should print an apology which the paper did.
http://www.thehoot.org/web/home/searchdetail.php?sid=651&bg=1

Elsewhere, he has written about the same incident:

The mother of all mischievous reports about me was by a Neeta Sharma, crime
reporter of the Hindustan Times and now with the NDTV. She reported that I had admitted before the court to having ISI links. The report said, “Iftikhar Gilani, 35 year old son-in-law of Hurriyat hardliner Syed Ali Shah Geelani, is believed to have admitted in a city court that he was an agent of Pakistan’s spy agency”. She went even further, and reported that Syed Ali Geelani was so happy with Iftikhar’s working with the ISI that he gave his daughter to him in marriage. What a ridiculous report! Thanks to friends in the Hindustan Times, and its Deputy Chairperson Shobna Bharatiya, the paper corrected itself.
http://www.sarai.net/publications/readers/04-crisis-media/29iftikar.pdf

Not surprisingly, Iftikhar has criticised the decision to give Neeta Sharma an award despite her failure to acknowledge her mistake and her failure to apologise for the unsavoury incident:
http://beta.milligazette.com/news/090-dubious-journalist-gets-award

As a colleague and friend of Iftikhar, and as the author of the Introduction to his book, I have no hesitation in also expressing my unhappiness at her selection.

I hope that even at this late stage, you as jury members can either find a way to withdraw this award or at least shame Neeta Sharma into acknowledging that the basic code of a good reporter involves respecting the truth and having the decency to say sorry when you make a grave mistake.

Yours sincerely,

Siddharth Varadarajan

A modest proposal on AFSPA

2010-09-06T15:20:00.003+05:30

Change the blanket ban on trials without official sanction to one where the government has the power to bar prosecution in individual cases provided it satisfies the courts that its reasons for doing so are valid...

6 September 2010
The Hindu

A modest proposal on AFSPA

Siddharth Varadarajan

The Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act has come in for widespread criticism in Jammu and Kashmir, Manipur and other parts of the northeast because of the human rights abuses that have come to be associated with its operation. So strong is the sentiment against AFSPA in Kashmir that in recent months Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Union Home Minister P. Chidambaram and Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Omar Abdullah have all spoken of the need to re-examine the law. The Army, on the other hand, says this is unnecessary.

The Army Chief, General V.K. Singh, has gone so far as to say that the demand for the dilution of AFSPA is being made for “narrow political gains.” On his part, Lt. Gen. B.S. Jaswal, GOC-in-C, Northern Command, has compared the Act to scripture. “I would like to say that the provisions of AFSPA are very pious to me and I think to the entire Indian Army. We have religious books, there are certain guidelines which are given there, but all the members of the religion do not follow it, they break it also … does it imply that you remove the religious book …?”

On paper, AFSPA is a deceptively simple law. First passed in 1958, it comes into play when the government declares a particular part of the northeast (or Jammu and Kashmir under a parallel 1990 law) a “disturbed area.” Within that area, an officer of the armed forces has the power to “fire upon or otherwise use force, even to the causing of death, against any person who is acting in contravention of any law or order for the time being in force in the disturbed area prohibiting the assembly of five or more persons or the carrying of weapons or of things capable of being used as weapons or of fire-arms, ammunition or explosive substances.”

Even though activists have made this the focus of their criticism, giving soldiers the “right to kill” is not, in my opinion, AFSPA's principal flaw. After all, if a ‘law and order' situation has arisen which compels the government to deploy the Army, soldiers have to be allowed to use deadly force. Even a private citizen has the right to kill someone in self-defence, though the final word on the legality of her or his action belongs to the courts. Similarly, a civilised society expects that the use of deadly force by the Army must at all times be lawful, necessary and proportionate. Here, the Act suffers from two infirmities: the requirement of prior sanction for prosecution contained in Section 6 often comes in the way when questions arise about the lawfulness of particular actions. Second, AFSPA does not distinguish between a peaceful gathering of five or more persons (even if held in contravention of Section 144 of the Criminal Procedure Code) and a violent mob. Firing upon the latter may sometimes be justified by necessity; shooting into a peaceful assembly would surely fail any test of reasonableness.

Leaving this issue aside, however, it is important to recognise that AFSPA does not give an officer the unqualified right to fire upon and cause the death of any person in a Disturbed Area. At a minimum, that person should have been carrying weapons or explosives. The shooting of an unarmed individual, and the killing of a person in custody, are not acts that are permissible under AFSPA. Force is allowed in order to arrest a suspect but the fact that the Act authorises the use of “necessary” rather than “deadly” force in such a circumstance means the tests of necessity and proportionality must be met.

Over the years that AFSPA has been in operation, the Army has opened fire countless times and killed hundreds, if not thousands, of people. Whenever those killed have been armed insurgents or terrorists, there has been little or no public clamour against the Act. It is only when the armed forces violate the provisions of the law and indulge in the unlawful killing of persons — especially unarmed civilians — that voices get raised against AFSPA. The protests in Manipur in 2004 reached a crescendo because of the death in custody of Th. Manorama and scores of others like her. In Kashmir, sentiments against the Armed Forces Act got inflamed because of fake encounter incidents like Pathribal and Macchhil.

If today people are questioning General Jaswal's “religious book,” it is not so much because of its provisions as because of the failure of its custodians to act when the law is flouted. The Lord's Word threatens sinners with fire and brimstone, eternal damnation or the endless cycle of births and deaths. But AFSPA holds out no such horrors for the soldiers who violate its provisions. Section 6 says “no prosecution … shall be instituted, except with the previous sanction of the Central government, against any person in respect of anything done or purported to be done in exercise of the powers conferred by this Act.” This requirement confers de facto impunity on all transgressors. Thus the CBI may have indicted army officers for the murder of innocent civilians at Pathribal in 2000 but their trial cannot take place because the Central government refuses to give sanction. What is worse, the Minister concerned does not even have to give any reasons.

The ostensible logic behind this Section, a variant of which can be found in Section 197 of the CrPC and in many Indian laws, is to protect public servants from frivolous or vexatious law suits. But though it has not ruled on the ambit of AFSPA's Section 6, the Supreme Court has often declared that the object of Section 197-type protection is not to set an official above the common law. “If he commits an offence not connected with his official duty he has no privilege.”

In the Pathribal case, the CBI took the view that abducting and killing unarmed civilians in cold blood could not be considered part of “official duty.” Not only did the MoD reject this logic, it moved the Supreme Court for quashing of the case on the ground that it has not granted sanction to prosecute. At no time has it been asked to furnish reasons for denying sanction.

A government which has faith in the actions of its officers and the robustness of its judicial system ought never to shy away from allowing the courts to step in when doubts arise. And yet, in case after case, legal proceedings get stymied by the denial of official sanction.

In a democracy, this requirement of previous sanction should have no place. But given the balance of political and institutional forces in India today, it is utopian to believe it can simply be done away with. What I am proposing, therefore, is a modest remedy. Let us not tamper with the government's ability to protect officers from criminal proceedings. But instead of the default setting being ‘no prosecution without official sanction,' let the blocking of a prosecution require official action.

Section 6 could thus be amended to read: “No prosecution … shall be instituted against any person in respect of anything done or purported to be done in exercise of the powers conferred by this Act where the Central government provides reasons in writing and the competent court upholds the legal validity of these reasons.”

Such a provision would prevent good officers from being prosecuted for killings which result from acts of good faith while allowing the bad apples to be prosecuted for their crimes. The government would still have the right to intervene on behalf of a soldier who has committed an illegal act. But this would require a Minister to take personal responsibility for a decision that would, after all, be tantamount to denying justice to the victim's family. In the Pathribal case, for example, Defence Minister A.K. Antony would be compelled to inform the trial court of his reasons for opposing the prosecution of soldiers indicted by the CBI for murder. And the court would get to rule on whether Mr. Antony's reasons were valid or not.

There is no reason why this inversion of the “previous sanction” provision cannot be replicated across the board in all Indian laws to cover situations where human rights abuses are alleged. Such a provision would not disturb the basic provisions of AFSPA. But it would bring that “religious book” in closer conformity with an even holier tome, the Constitution of India.

Last chance to fix flawed torture Bill

2010-08-27T09:59:00.005+05:30

The draft law excludes many scenarios and forms of torture rampant in India. The Rajya Sabha must insist on amendments...

27 August 2010
The Hindu

Last chance to fix flawed torture Bill

Siddharth Varadarajan

The Prevention of Torture Bill, 2010, which the Rajya Sabha will take up for consideration on Friday, is a deeply flawed piece of legislation that will weaken, rather than strengthen, existing legal sanctions against a crime that is widely acknowledged to be rampant across India.

Though the Lok Sabha approved the Bill without changes on May 6, it is essential that the upper house remedies the flaws it contains before it is too late.

The stated purpose of the law is to fulfil the country's obligations under the United Nations Convention Against Torture (CAT). India signed the Convention in 1997 but is perhaps the only democracy yet to ratify it. But if this belated push for ratification is a welcome development, the weak provisions of the proposed law bear little resemblance to the contents of the CAT.

The definition

Let us start with the definition of torture. This is how the Convention defines it. Article I says “torture” means any act done by or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official “by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind.”

The Indian draft borrows some of this language but arbitrarily narrows the scope of this Article. According to Section 3 of the Bill, torture will said to have been inflicted only when “(i) grievous hurt to any person; or (ii) danger to life, limb or health (whether mental or physical) of any person” is caused by public servants for the purposes of “obtain[ing] … information or a confession from him or a third person”.

In other words, torture that is in inflicted by the police or a public servant as a form of punishment, intimidation or coercion will not be considered “torture” under the new law. Nor will any torture visited on an individual solely on account of her or his religion, caste, gender or economic status.

The omission of such situations — as envisaged by an international convention to which India is a party — is unforgivable given the prevalence of torture for these very reasons.

What makes this definitional narrowing even more problematic is the high threshold set for torture itself. The CAT speaks of “severe pain or suffering” rather than “grievous hurt” or “danger to life, limb or health” because it is the infliction of severe pain which is common to all forms of torture, even those which do not have long-term consequences for the health of the victim. Electric shocks, water boarding and the insertion of chilli powder in the sensitive parts of an individual's body will cause severe pain or suffering without necessarily endangering her or his health or even causing “grievous hurt”. Why has the Manmohan Singh government chosen such a narrow definition, excluding both motives for, and forms of, torture that are widely prevalent in India?

Having defined torture in such a restrictive way, the Bill goes on to narrow it even further in Section 4, which deals with punishment. It says a public servant shall be punishable for up to 10 years if he tortures any person “(a) for the purposes of extorting from him or from any other person interested in him, any confession or any information which may lead to the detection of an offence or misconduct; and (b) on the ground of his religion, race, place of birth, residence, language, caste or community or any ground whatsoever”.

Here, it would seem that even the class of persons who are tortured in order to extract a confession or some information from them must fulfil another condition before they can be considered torture victims: they must also have been targeted on account of some ascriptive identity. When Section 3 defines what constitutes torture, it is strange that the section on punishment should confine itself to torture done on specific grounds.

Cruel irony

Another major flaw with the Bill is the six-month time limit a torture victim is given under Section 5 to file a complaint. This is especially problematic for cases of custodial torture, which, unfortunately, are the norm in India. Most victims of torture may not feel confident about filing a complaint when the policemen or public servants who tortured them continue to have the capacity to inflict bodily harm. And, in a cruel irony, any act of violence inflicted upon a complainant — since the aim is not to make them confess or provide information but simply to coerce them into withdrawing their charges — would actually be excluded from the Prevention of Torture Bill's definition of torture.

Despite the gravity of the offence — which cannot be considered part of the legitimate discharge of duty by a public servant — the Bill has a section which says that “previous sanction” of the Central or relevant State government is needed in order for a court to take cognisance of an offence. In other words, after arbitrarily narrowing the scope and definition of torture and making it extremely difficult for a victim to file a complaint, the government gives the torturers within its ranks yet another layer of protection. Across India, there are dozens of cases in which sanction to prosecute is never given despite public officials being accused of heinous crimes. The inclusion of “previous sanction” in the torture Bill does not speak well of the government's intentions.

Even at this late stage, it is essential that the Rajya Sabha makes four changes.

First, the definition of torture should be harmonised with CAT, to which India is a signatory.

Second, Section 4 dealing with punishment should be harmonised with the updated definition of torture.

Third, there should be no time limit for a victim to file a torture complaint. Torture is a crime and if other crimes are not subject to an arbitrary ‘statute of limitations', why should this?

Fourth, the Section on previous sanction should be deleted or altered to say that where the government is of the view that a public servant should not be prosecuted for the crime of torture, it must state the reasons in writing.

Update #1: 10 MPs want torture Bill referred to panel
The Hindu 29 August 2010

Update #2: Rajya Sabha Refers Torture Prevention Bill to Select Committee
The Hindu 31 August 2010

This is no way to write a law

2010-08-25T12:30:00.004+05:30

The nuclear liability bill drafting process has been marred by lack of consultation and transparency from the start. In a democracy, legislation by stealth will always create a backlash.

25 August 2010
The Hindu

This is no way to write a law

Siddharth Varadarajan

Behind the unseemly word games the Manmohan Singh government has been playing over the language of the proposed nuclear liability bill lies a more dangerous conceit: that complex legislation with the potential to affect the lives of tens of millions of people can simply be pushed through with stealth, subterfuge and the barest minimum of consultation.

Not once but thrice have the government's managers been caught trying to fiddle with the bill in order to address the concerns of nuclear suppliers that are obviously so illegitimate nobody seems to have the political stomach to even try to convince the public about them. What were they thinking? That people would laugh and say, what's wrong with a bit of ‘and' here and a bit of ‘intent' there and pat them on the back for their craftiness?

At the initial stages of consideration, the first attempt was made to simply delete Clause 17(b), which allows the Indian nuclear operator — who is otherwise wholly liable — to exercise a right of recourse in the event that an accident is caused by gross negligence on the part of the supplier. Difficult though it may be to prove gross negligence, U.S. nuclear industry representatives made it clear this provision was unacceptable to them. Therefore, without any attempt to discuss or debate the issue publicly, the Manmohan Singh government simply sought to oblige them. On June 8, the Department of Atomic Energy circulated a ‘consolidated list of proposed amendments' to the Standing Committee on Science and technology suggesting the deletion of 17(b) altogether. When members of the Standing Committee objected, the DAE Secretary, Srikumar Banerjee, said this was only a “suggestion” and withdrew it.

Subsequently, when the Standing Committee agreed to strengthen 17(b) by allowing a right of recourse against the supplier in the event of an accident caused by defective equipment, the government sought to nullify it by making this conditional on the same being spelt out in a commercial contract. Forced to abandon that position too, the Union Cabinet finally cleared a version which allows a right of recourse against the supplier only if the latter intentionally causes an accident. That's a camel so huge it is unlikely to ever pass through the eye of a needle.

Now, surely the primary motive of liability legislation in a democracy ought to be reassuring people that their interests would be fully looked after in the unlikely event of an accident. In this case, however, the motive seems to have become reassuring the foreign suppliers who stand to make billions of dollars supplying nuclear reactors to India that their interests would be fully looked after, come what may.

Somewhere along the line, our rulers forgot that we are a democracy. They also forgot that this is, after all, Bhopal country. Twenty years on, the victims of the world's worst industrial disaster languish without adequate financial compensation or health care. The Indian administrative and judicial system has failed to assign legal culpability for the incident and still cannot decide who should pay for the removal of toxic wastes from the plant site that have leeched into the soil and groundwater. Against this backdrop, the government ought to have gone out of its way to reassure the public that the lessons from Bhopal were being acted upon, that every concern about the consequences of a nuclear accident would be addressed openly and transparently, that every effort would be made to use the levers of regulation and liability to ensure the highest attention to safety by all those in the nuclear energy production chain whose activities or products could conceivably contribute to an accident. A broad range of views within and outside government ought to have been solicited at the drafting stage itself so that the final product could have the widest possible ownership. But this never happened.

Work on the legislation began as an in-house effort of the Department of Atomic Energy a decade ago, well before there was any possibility of the Nuclear Suppliers Group agreeing to nuclear commerce with India. Even though a draft law was readied, the Centre showed little or no urgency in discussing, let alone enacting, it. So much for the official claim that the law's aim is to provide speedy compensation to victims. Once the NSG clearance came, however, the Manmohan Singh government saw the liability issue as something that had to be pushed through to provide comfort to foreign suppliers. After all, the U.S. nuclear lobby managed to make India's accession to the IAEA's Convention on Supplementary Compensation for Nuclear Damage (CSC) — which effectively indemnifies suppliers from any liability — a pre-requisite for any nuclear sales.

India gave a formal assurance on the CSC to the U.S. on September 10, 2008 and that is when the legislative clock started ticking in earnest. The DAE's draft was circulated to only a handful of Ministries — Finance, Environment, Home, External Affairs and Law. Ministries like Health, Water Resources, Food and Agriculture, upon whom the burden of handling a nuclear accident would inevitably fall, were never consulted at the drafting stage. The Standing Committee attempted to remedy the situation at the eleventh hour by inviting other Ministries but hardly any of their excellent suggestions even made it to the committee's recommendations.

As matters stand, a political consensus has emerged over the Standing Committee's proposal to hike compensation limits and the need to hold suppliers indirectly liable via the right of recourse for defective equipment. Just as in other hazardous industries, of course, culpability will still have to be established in a court of law. But what the suppliers want is a free pass at the start-up stage itself.

Instead of relying on stealth, the government ought to argue up front why it does not believe suppliers should be indirectly liable for any potential nuclear accident. But its arguments should be grounded in facts and sound analysis, not theology. For example, if suppliers are forced to take out insurance to cover themselves as a result of the Indian law, how much will this affect the cost of a nuclear power project? It is meaningless to argue that no country, not even South Korea, has a law as balanced in its apportioning of liability as India. India is not “any other country.” It plans to buy 20 to 25 large reactors over the next two decades and need not behave as if it is entering a suppliers' market. It is said Indian suppliers will also be reluctant to provide components for our indigenous reactors if the operator can exercise a right of recourse against them. But the fact is that the current legal regime in India exposes suppliers to unlimited liability and that hasn't prevented major Indian corporates from manufacturing products for the NPCIL's reactors around the country.

Even if the government is ultimately forced to concede this point, the Opposition should insist that the right of recourse cannot be limited by the Rs 1500 crore operator liability cap but must extend to cover the full amount the government must pay in the event of an accident. There is also one other clause that needs improvement. Though many experts pointed this out in their testimony, the Standing Committee passed up the opportunity to clarify Clause 46, which purports to allow victims to take legal action under other laws. If the aim of this clause is to explicitly preserve the right of victims to file tort claims, why does it only speak of the “operator” not being exempt from other legal proceedings? The absence of a reference to the supplier here is likely to become an obstacle if victims pursue tortious liability claims.

To be sure, these sorts of improvements will not go down well with foreign nuclear suppliers. But this is the price they will have to pay to get a share of the energy sector in a democratic country like India. As Montek Singh Ahluwalia famously said in one of his leaked emails on the U.S. suggestion that the government be lenient towards Dow Chemicals in order to win American investment and support: “There is always a quid pro quo, though I fear on this we are helpless.”

Final version of nuclear bill lets suppliers off the hook again

2010-08-23T01:08:00.003+05:30

In a third attempt to indemnify foreign suppliers, the government now wants them to be liable only if they intentionally cause an accident....

22 August 2010
The Hindu

Final version of nuclear bill lets suppliers off the hook again

Siddharth Varadarajan

Despite assuring the Left and the BJP that their concerns on the government’s proposed nuclear liability law had been fully addressed, the final version of the bill – as cleared by the Union Cabinet on Friday – protects foreign companies in the event of a nuclear accident caused by gross negligence or defective supplies on their part.

It does this by raising a legal barrier against damage claims that is so high it will be impossible to scale. The amended version of the bill says the suppliers of any defective equipment involved in an accident can be sued by the Indian operator of a nuclear facility only if the supply in question was made “with the intent to cause nuclear damage”.

In other words, the operator, who is wholly liable in the first instance for any damages resulting from an accident caused by that faulty equipment, can recover his money only if it is proved that the supplier intentionally caused the accident.

Clause 17(b) of the original draft allowed a right of recourse for the operator in the event of an accident resulting from “a wilful act” or “gross negligence” on the part of the supplier. As reported by The Hindu on March 8 and April 1, U.S. nuclear suppliers want this clause deleted as they feel it would expose them to litigation.

Critics in India, on the other hand, saw these conditions as too weak. The Standing Committee on Science & Technology, whose report on the bill was released earlier this week, felt the “vague” language of 17(b) offered suppliers an “escape route” and needed strengthening. “In case an incident takes place, it would be difficult to prove and establish the fact that it was a wilful act or gross negligence on the part of the supplier”, the report said. “Hence there should be clear cut liability on the supplier of nuclear equipments/material in case they are found to be defective”. The committee also quoted the testimony of the Secretary (Legislative Department) to argue the use of the doctrine of mens rea, or criminal intent, though common in criminal and tax law, “is grossly inadequate and misplaced” in compensation cases.

Accordingly, the Standing Committee expanded the scope of the right of recourse in 17(b) to include nuclear incidents resulting “as a consequence of latent or patent defect, supply of sub-standard material, defective equipment or services” in addition to gross negligence.

The government’s first attempt by stealth to indemnify suppliers from legal action came in June, when it circulated amendments to the Standing Committee deleting 17(b) altogether. When the Opposition cried foul, it backed off, seeking instead to negate the clause by making it contingent on 17(a), which grants operators a right of recourse against suppliers only if expressly provided for in a contract. Forced to backtrack there too, the government now appears to have hit upon the inclusion of intent as the best way of ensuring foreign suppliers never face legal action in the event of a nuclear accident.

Thus, the amended 17(b) gives the operator a right of recourse where “the nuclear incident has resulted as a consequence of an act of supplier or his employees, done with intent to cause nuclear damage, and such act includes supply of equipment or material with patent or latent defects or sub-standard services”.

Since accidents resulting from the intentional acts of a “person” (including corporate entities like a supplier) are already covered by 17(c) of the original draft, the government is now proposing to replace the word “person” in 17(c) with “individual” to avoid the charge of redundancy.

If the earlier subterfuge was to merge 17(b) with 17(a), the attempt now is merge it with 17(c). Either way, the Manmohan Singh government’s aim is the same: to produce legal language that would shield foreign suppliers from civil suits.

Government set to let suppliers off the hook

2010-08-19T13:13:00.003+05:30

Parliamentary Standing Committee proposes major dilution of nuclear liability Bill ...

18 August 2010
The Hindu

Government set to let suppliers off the hook

Siddharth Varadarajan

New Delhi: Their hand-wringing and finger-pointing over Union Carbide now behind them, Congress and BJP legislators came together on Wednesday to recommend modification of the proposed law on civil nuclear liability to let foreign suppliers of equipment off the hook for any accident caused by their negligence.

In its report submitted to Parliament, the Standing Committee on Science & Technology suggested a change in the nuclear liability Bill, making the recovery of damages from a supplier — even in the event of gross negligence — contingent upon his prior acceptance of liability in a written contract. This is a major dilution of the existing provision.

The draft Bill makes the operator of a nuclear facility wholly liable for any damage stemming from an accident. As it stands, Clause 17 allows him to exercise a right of recourse under three circumstances: (a) where it is expressly provided for in a contract in writing; (b) where the accident results from the gross or wilful negligence of the supplier or his employees; or (c) where an individual intentionally causes the accident.

Citing the legal difficulty in establishing the culpability for negligence, the standing committee has recommended expanding the scope of 17 (b) to include accidents caused by “latent or patent defect, supply of sub-standard material, defective equipment or services.” But it has made this contingent on the written contract between operator and supplier expressly providing for these eventualities. “The Committee … recommends that Clause 17(a) may end with the word ‘and',” the report says, adding “that the operator must secure his interest through appropriate provisions in the contract with the supplier.”

The report was adopted by all members of the committee, barring two Left MPs who submitted dissent notes, protesting this effective dilution of 17(b).

The Hindu first reported the U.S. nuclear industry's unhappiness with the original text of 17(b) in March 2010. In June, this newspaper highlighted the government's surreptitious attempt to delete the sub-clause even as the standing committee was considering the Bill. In the ensuing uproar, the Department of Atomic Energy backed off. But if the parliamentary panel's recommendation is incorporated — the Cabinet is to clear the Bill's final version on Thursday and the House may vote on it next week — the suppliers would have had their way.

Left MPs say the insertion of the word “and” after 17(a) was clearly an afterthought as a new sheet was inserted into the printed report of the committee to accommodate the change.

The reason for this last minute modification is presumably the September 2008 promise the Manmohan Singh government made to the U.S. to “take all steps necessary to adhere to the Convention on Supplementary Compensation for Nuclear Damage (CSC).” The U.S. wants India in it because Indian victims of an accident would then be barred from filing damage claims in U.S. courts in the event of an accident caused by American-supplied equipment.

The CSC limits the operator's right of recourse essentially to what his contract with the supplier provides for. Despite this, Indian officials, aware of the link between liability and safety, included supplier negligence as a standalone ground. But in the face of U.S. pressure, the government is now trying to retrofit the Bill to make it CSC compliant.

Globally, th U.S., South Korea and Hungary provide the operators with a right of recourse against the suppliers in the event of gross negligence, regardless of whether or not the contract provides for it or not. Even with a trusted friend like Russia, India is having a tough time including a right of recourse in the contract. That is why the Bill envisaged explicitly giving the operator the right in the event of the supplier's gross negligence.

The danger in India's Nepal policy

2010-08-16T16:32:00.004+05:30

New Delhi might have been a reluctant midwife these past few years but it always managed to come out on the right side of the changes Nepal was undergoing. Not anymore...

16 August 2010
The Hindu

The danger in India's Nepal policy

Siddharth Varadarajan

You know you've hit rock-bottom when an intelligence operative in the Indian mission in Kathmandu calls up a member of Nepal's Constituent Assembly and threatens to have his daughter's provisional admission in the embassy-run Kendriya Vidyalaya revoked if he doesn't vote a particular way.

Welcome to the diplomatic brilliance of a rising India, a country which is bedevilled with intractable political problems in Kashmir, its forested heartland and the north-east but which doesn't think twice about plunging headlong into the cesspit of day-to-day politics in a neighbouring nation. The threatening phone call was made by the Indian embassy official on the eve of the fourth round of voting in the CA earlier this month between the Maoist candidate for Prime Minister, Prachanda, and the Nepali Congress (NC) candidate, Ram Chandra Poudel. Given the prospect of fence-sitting Madhesi political parties moving over en masse to the Maoist camp, the Indian effort was aimed at ensuring this didn't happen and that the stalemate between the two candidates continued.

For the record, Indian officials deny the allegation made by the CA member, Ram Kumar Sharma, but there is hardly anyone in Nepal who doesn't believe it is true. Even by the interventionist standards of the past, the threat marks a new low. Leaving aside the moral and diplomatic implications raised by this unpleasant episode, the threat of punitive action against a young girl suggests a wider, even catastrophic, failure of Indian policy. In the past, India always had the ability to work behind the scenes with a wide cross-section of players in order to produce a political outcome that broadly benefited both Nepal and itself. Today, that is no longer the case. Even when they play their hands in the open, our men in Kathmandu are unable to ensure a stable outcome.

Last week, I followed the lead of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's special envoy to Nepal, Shyam Saran, who had just been in Kathmandu, and met senior leaders cutting across all major political trends: from the Maoists, who are the biggest party with 40 per cent of the seats in the CA, the NC, the Unified Marxists-Leninists and the different Madhesi factions. Even though their views on the current political crisis varied sharply, virtually all the politicians I met agreed that Indian interference in the politics of the country had reached a new high. Many blamed this interference for the failure of these parties to establish some sort of modus vivendi among themselves.

This failure is costing the country dear. It has delayed not only the writing of the new constitution but also the completion of the peace process — the integration of erstwhile combatants of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) within the official security forces and the democratisation of the Nepal Army. On paper, these are goals India officially supports. And the fact that Nepal has come so far on all of these questions has a lot to do with New Delhi's earlier support and encouragement, particularly in the struggle against the now-abolished monarchy. But somewhere along the line, India has lost the plot, allowing the paranoia and tunnel vision of its security and intelligence establishment to compromise its long-term strategic interests.

Ever since the confrontation between the Maoist-led government and the Nepal Army in 2009 led to the resignation of Mr. Prachanda as Prime Minister, India has been dead-set against the Maoists leading any kind of coalition government in Kathmandu. Indeed, the officials running India's Nepal policy made it clear the Maoists should ideally not even be allowed to join a coalition headed by someone else, that they be “punished” — a word Indian diplomats in Kathmandu have used with their counterparts from other countries — for having dared to presume they could call the shots in the wake of their victory in the April 2008 CA elections.

During the wasted year of Madhav Kumar Nepal's premiership, which India backed to the hilt, New Delhi hoped the Maoists would either split or come under pressure to accept a unilateralist reading of the Twelve Point Understanding and the Comprehensive Peace Agreement — two documents which paved the way for the constitutional and political transformation of Nepal. Though the Maoists see themselves as creating a new mainstream, India wants them to stick to the old mainstream and abandon the hope of restructuring the Nepali state and its institutions in any fundamental way. This the Maoists are not prepared to do.

After 12 months of political stagnation, matters slowly started coming to the boil again since the end of May when a package deal struck to extend the life of the CA by another year led to the resignation of Mr. Nepal as Prime Minister. Last year, Indian officials split the Madhesi Janadhikar Forum of Upendra Yadav in order to ensure that Mr. Nepal had the requisite numbers to form the government. But efforts to ensure a similar arrangement again are floundering over deep divisions within the UML. A rightist faction led by K.P. Oli shares the official Indian antipathy towards the former insurgents but party leader Jhalanath Khanal believes only a consensual approach towards the Maoists will allow the CA to finish its work.

Within the charged political atmosphere, an all-party government led by Mr. Khanal with the participation of the Maoists and the NC would have been the most propitious arrangement if the aim is to complete the peace process and write the constitution by the new deadline of May 2011. Indeed, the Maoists last month said in writing that they would support Mr. Khanal, whose party insisted he have not just a simple plurality of CA members backing him but a two-thirds majority. However, the last minute defection of Upendra Yadav meant Mr. Khanal's numbers fell short, leading to Mr. Prachanda and the NC's Mr. Poudel entering the fray.

Whatever New Delhi may say, UML leaders and politicians from virtually every other party blame Mr. Yadav's sudden change of heart on Indian pressure. What makes these allegations credible is the extent to which the Indian embassy in Kathmandu has got involved in micro-managing political events and even media discourse in the country. Last month, Nepal's biggest newspaper group, Kantipur, which has been critical of the Indian position, faced the prospect of suspending publication because supplies of newsprint were deliberately held up by customs authorities in Kolkata on instructions from the intelligence agencies. The issue was resolved only after the newspapers agreed in meetings with Indian embassy officials to adopt a more “constructive” editorial position.

As matters stand, India does not see the integration of the PLA and constitution-writing as part of an organic process. For that reason, it shares the indifferent attitude of Nepal's old mainstream towards the writing of a new constitution even as it insists the PLA question be resolved quickly. There are a number of proposals for PLA integration and army restructuring on the table, including a non-paper by the U.N. Mission in Nepal. But these cannot be discussed and taken forward in the absence of a consensual atmosphere.

If the next round of voting in the CA is inconclusive, the Maoists and the NC should withdraw from the fray and explore the possibility of Mr. Khanal leading a government with the participation of all. The Maoists should realise that 40 per cent is not enough for them to have their way on all issues and that heading a government for just 9 months should not become the be all and end all of political strategy. All constitutions are living documents. If the Maoists win a majority in the next election, they can always try and improve the constitution. On their part, the NC and the UML, and the Indian establishment, should stop looking at the Maoists as an ‘insurgent' outfit just because several thousand PLA soldiers are still living in UNMIN-supervised cantonments. These soldiers confer no political advantage to the Maoists since the “people's war,” once abandoned, cannot be restarted. Integrating them into a democratised national army would be a win-win all round. In exchange for the loss of dedicated party cadres — 5,000-8,000 men would never be able to stage a coup or subvert a lakh-strong force — the Maoists want the national army to be ethnically inclusive and brought firmly under civilian control. Surely that is something everyone ought to back wholeheartedly. By working against the possibility of a new political equilibrium that can accomplish these goals in Nepal, India is playing a dangerous game that will eventually boomerang.

The only package Kashmir needs is justice

2010-08-05T15:30:00.006+05:30

If the Prime Minister does not take bold steps to address the grievances of the Kashmiris, there's no telling where the next eruption will take us...

5 August 2010
The Hindu

The only package Kashmir needs is justice

Siddharth Varadarajan

Whatever his other failings, Chief Minister Omar Abdullah deserves praise for acknowledging that the protests which have rocked the Kashmir valley these past few weeks are ‘leaderless' and not the product of manipulation by some hidden individual or group.

This admission has been difficult for the authorities to make because its implications are unpleasant, perhaps even frightening. In security terms, the absence of a central nervous system means the expanding body of protest cannot be controlled by arresting individual leaders. And in political terms, the spectre of leaderless revolt makes the offer of ‘dialogue' or the naming of a ‘special envoy' for Kashmir — proposals which might have made sense last year or even last month — seem completely and utterly pointless today.

Ever since the current phase of disturbances began, intelligence officials have been wasting precious time convincing the leadership and public of India that the protests are solely or mostly the handiwork of agent provocateurs. So we have been told of the role of the Lashkar-e-Taiba and ISI, of the ‘daily wage of Rs. 200' — and even narcotics — being given to stone pelters. A few weeks back, an audio recording of a supposedly incriminating telephone call was leaked to the media along with a misleading transcript suggesting the Geelani faction of the Hurriyat was behind the upsurge. Now, our TV channels have “learned” from their “sources” that the protests will continue till President Obama's visit in November.

Central to this delusional narrative of manipulated protest is the idea that the disturbances are confined to just a few pockets in the valley. Last week, Union Home Minister P. Chidambaram told reporters the problem was limited to Srinagar and a few other towns. No doubt, some areas like downtown Srinagar, Sopore and Baramulla were in the ‘vanguard' but one of the reasons the protests spread was popular frustration over the way in which the authenticity of mass sentiment was being dismissed by the government. For the women who came on to the streets with their pots and pans and even stones, or the youths who set up spontaneous blood donation camps to help those injured in the demonstrations, this attempt to strip their protest of both legitimacy and agency was yet another provocation.

In the face of this mass upsurge, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has two options. He can declare, like the party apparatchiks in Brecht's poem, that since the people have thrown away the confidence of the government, it is time for the government to dissolve the people and elect another. Or he can admit, without prevarication or equivocation, that his government has thrown away the confidence of the ordinary Kashmiri.

This was not the way things looked in January 2009, when Omar Abdullah became chief minister. Assembly elections had gone off well. And though turnout in Srinagar and other towns was low, there was goodwill for the young leader. Of course, those who knew the state well had warned the Centre not to treat the election as an end in itself. The ‘masla-e-Kashmir' remained on the table and the people wanted it resolved. Unfortunately, the Centre failed to recognise this.

It is too early to gauge the reaction to Mr. Abdullah's promise of a “political package” once normalcy is restored. But the people who have thronged the streets are likely to ask why this package — which the chief minister himself admitted was “long in the pipeline” — was never delivered for all the months normalcy prevailed. What came in the way of amending the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act? Of ensuring there was zero tolerance for human rights violations? Of strengthening the “ongoing peace process both internally and externally”, as the all-party meeting in Srinagar earlier this month reminded the Centre to do?

At the heart of this missing package is the Centre's failure to craft a new security and political strategy for a situation where militancy no longer poses the threat it once did. The security forces in the valley continue to operate with an expansive mandate that is not commensurate with military necessity. Even if civilian deaths are less than before, the public's capacity to tolerate ‘collateral damage' when it is officially said that militancy has ended and normalcy has returned is also much less than before.

The immediate trigger for the current phase of protests was the death of 17-year-old Tufail Mattoo, who was killed by a tear gas canister which struck his head during a protest in Srinagar in June against the Machhil fake encounter of April 30. Many observers have blamed his death — and the deaths of other young men since then — on the security forces lacking the training and means for non-lethal crowd control. Tear gas, rubber bullets and water cannon are used all over the world in situations where protests turn violent but in India, live ammunition seems to be the first and only line of defence. Even tear gas canisters are so poorly designed here that they lead to fatalities.

Whatever the immediate cause, however, it is also safe to say that young Tufail died as a direct result of Machhil. Though the Army has arrested the soldiers responsible for the fake encounter, the only reason they had the nerve to commit such a heinous crime was because they were confident they would get away with it. And at the root of that confidence is Pathribal, the notorious fake encounter of 2000. The army officers involved in the kidnapping and murder of five Kashmiri civilians there continue to be at liberty despite being charge-sheeted by the CBI. The Ministry of Defence has refused to grant sanction for their prosecution and has taken the matter all the way to the Supreme Court in an effort to ensure its men do not face trial. What was the message that went out as a result?

Had the Centre made an example of the rotten apples that have spoiled the reputation of the Army instead of protecting them all these years, the Machhil encounter might never have happened. Tufail would not be dead and angry mobs would not be attacking police stations and government buildings. Impunity for the few has directly endangered the lives of all policemen and paramilitary personnel stationed in Kashmir. There is a lesson in this, surely, for those who say punishing the guilty will lower the morale of the security forces.

Mr. Abdullah may not be the best administrator but his biggest handicap as chief minister has been the Centre's refusal to address the ordinary Kashmiri's concerns about the over-securitsation of the state. Today, when he is being forced to induct an even greater number of troops into the valley, the Chief Minister's ability to push for a political package built around demilitarisation is close to zero.

At the Centre's urging, Mr. Abdullah made a televised speech to his people. His words do not appear to have made any difference. Nor could they, when the crisis staring us in the face is of national and international proportions. Today, the burden of our past sins in Kashmir has come crashing down like hailstones. Precious time is being frittered in thinking of ways to turn the clock back. Sending in more forces to shoot more protesters, changing the chief minister, imposing Governor's Rule — all of these are part of the reliquary of failed statecraft. We are where we are because these policies never worked.

The Prime Minister can forget about the Commonwealth Games, AfPak and other issues. Kashmir is where his leadership is urgently required. The Indian state successfully overcame the challenge posed by terrorism and militancy. But a people in ferment cannot be dealt with the same way. Manmohan Singh must take bold steps to demonstrate his willingness to address the grievances of ordinary Kashmiris. He should not insult their sentiments by talking of economic packages, roundtable conferences and all-party talks. He should unreservedly express regret for the deaths that have occurred these past few weeks. He should admit, in frankness and humility, the Indian state's failure to deliver justice all these years. And he should ask the people of Kashmir for a chance to make amends. There is still no guarantee the lava of public anger which is flowing will cool. But if he doesn't make an all-out effort to create some political space today, there is no telling where the next eruption in the valley will take us.

Shyam Saran being sent as special envoy to Nepal

2010-08-04T23:20:00.002+05:30

As Nepal's Constituent Assembly remains deadlocked, an Indian envoy will try his hand at consensus building...

4 August 2010
The Hindu

Shyam Saran being sent as special envoy to Nepal

Siddharth Varadarajan

New Delhi: In an effort to end the stalemate in Nepal over the election of a new prime minister, India is sending its former Foreign Secretary, Shyam Saran, as special envoy to Kathmandu on Wednesday with a mandate to engage all political parties, including the Maoists, and help build a consensus on the formation of a government that can take the peace process and the task of Constitution writing to a conclusion by next year's new deadline.

Mr. Saran served earlier as the Indian ambassador in Kathmandu and played a key role within the Indian establishment in backing the 12-point understanding among the Maoists, the Nepali Congress and the Unified Marxists-Leninists. That alliance, which eventually led to the end of the monarchy and the establishment of a republic, came under strain before — and especially after — the 2008 elections to the Constituent Assembly in which the former rebels led by Pushpa Kamal Dahal ‘Prachanda' emerged as the single largest party.

Mr. Prachanda, who was subsequently sworn in as the first elected Prime Minister of the republic, resigned in 2009 following a stand-off with the Nepal Army in which the NC and the UML, as well as India, sided with the generals. UML leader Madhav Kumar Nepal then became the Prime Minister. Following his resignation on June 30, 2010, the CA has been unable to elect a new leader, with both Mr. Prachanda, and the NC candidate, Ram Chandra Poudel, failing to win a simple majority in the 601-member House despite repeated balloting. The UML and the Madhesi parties have so far abstained, though there are indications that the largest of the Madhesi groups may be inclined to back the Maoists.

Sources say Mr. Saran's role will be to consult with the Maoists and the two smaller national parties, as well as with the various Madhesi factions. The decision to form a government will have to be taken by the Nepali parties themselves but New Delhi feels it can no longer afford to remain completely aloof from the process.

India-Russia nuclear talks hit liability snag

2010-07-30T11:40:00.003+05:30

Russian suppliers do not want any liability for accidents in India ...

30 July 2010
The Hindu

India-Russia nuclear talks hit liability snag

Siddharth Varadarajan

New Delhi: It is not just American suppliers, Russia too is now insisting that all liability for any accident that may occur in reactors sold to India must rest solely with the Indian operator and not with Russian companies involved in supplying components and knowhow.

At the last round of commercial negotiations held in Moscow recently between the Nuclear Power Corporation of India Ltd (NPCIL) and Atomstroyexport for the supply of four additional 1000 MWe reactors at Kudankulam (KK 3,4,5,6), the two countries failed to agree on the issue of liability. The Indian side wanted the contract to include a ‘right of recourse' which would allow NPCIL to claim damages from Atomstroyexport in the event of an accident resulting from negligence on the part of the Russian supplier. But Russian officials refused, citing the Inter-Governmental Agreement (IGA) the two countries signed in 2008 to back up their stand that all liability must be channelled on to NPCIL, the operator at Kudankulam.

Indeed, the IGA which India and Russia finalised in February 2008 and signed in December that year is clear on this point. Though the agreement has not been made public, The Hindu has accessed the text. Article 13 states: “The Indian Side and its authorised organisation at any time and at all stages of the construction and operation of the NPP power units to be constructed under the present Agreement shall be the Operator of power units of the NPP at the Kudankulam Site and be fully responsible for any damage both within and outside the territory of the Republic of India caused to any person and property as a result of a nuclear incident occurring at the NPP.”

Since Article 13 does not provide for the operator's right of recourse — a standard part of international conventions on civil nuclear liability — the Russian side says India's insistence on its inclusion in the commercial contract runs counter to the IGA.

Indian officials acknowledge the lacuna but put it down to India's weak negotiating hand in the days before the Nuclear Suppliers Group voted to lift its export ban on the country in September 2008. The language on liability was copied verbatim from the agreement for the first two Kudankulam reactors, though India — which is in the market for a mammoth 20,000 MWe of imported reactor capacity — is likely to drive a harder bargain in future negotiations with Russia.

More hurdles

Nevertheless, the current stand-off is likely to further complicate the Manmohan Singh government's efforts to pass a nuclear liability law that is acceptable to all domestic stakeholders and foreign partners.

The draft law includes three grounds for the Indian nuclear operator to invoke a right of recourse against its foreign suppliers. India is under pressure from the U.S. to dilute one of those provisions — Section 17(b) — which allows for claims in the event of negligence. Diplomatic sources told The Hindu that Russia was also uncomfortable with this clause.

Though Russia is refusing to include a right of recourse for the Kudankulam reactors, the 1963 Vienna Convention on Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage — which the Russian Federation acceded to in 2005 — allows for such a right if expressly provided for by a contract in writing.

The Ramnath Goenka Award...

2010-07-27T12:51:00.005+05:30

On July 22, I received the Ramnath Goenka Award for Journalist of the Year (Print) for 2008-9 from the President of India, Pratibha Devisingh Patil. The award was for my work in 2007-2008.

This is the citation, as read out at the ceremony:

JOURNALIST OF THE YEAR (PRINT)

Siddharth Varadarajan of The Hindu: For his consistent reporting of strategic affairs — on the Indian Safeguards Agreement process at the IAEA and the Nuclear Supplies Group and on the last-minute wrinkles in the 123 agreement. And for his insightful analysis, and often contrarian perspective, of the strategic policy establishment.

The image above is from the Indian Express of July 25, 2010.

DIPLOMATIC NOTEBOOK: Facing up to the Myanmar challenge

2010-07-27T12:02:00.006+05:30

India's heart may be with Aung San Suu Kyi and the struggle for democracy but its head knows there's no alternative to dealing with the military. Is there a middle path?

27 July 2010
The Hindu

DIPLOMATIC NOTEBOOK
Facing up to the Myanmar challenge

Siddharth Varadarajan

Senior General Than Shwe, head of Myanmar's military government, is not a man who travels outside his country very often. So the fact that he will spend five days in India this week and be given a ceremonial reception in New Delhi on Tuesday has raised eyebrows around the world.

Most international commentators have noted the obvious contradiction of how a nation with a proud democratic tradition is playing host to a dictator. India's special relationship with Myanmar is said by western critics to be a good example of what happens when countries formulate their foreign policy based on realpolitik rather than morality and principles. In 2006, George W. Bush made a pitch for India to join the United States in isolating the military regime. “India's leadership is needed in a world that is hungry for freedom”, he said in a speech at the Purana Qila in Delhi. Naming Burma and a few other countries, he said India and the U.S. “must stand with reformers and dissidents and civil society organizations, and hasten the day when the people of these nations can determine their own future and choose their own leaders”.

Fine words, but the reality is a little more complex. There was a time when India stood on the side of the angels in Burma. In the early 1990s, it backed Aung San Suu Kyi in her opposition to the State Law and Order Restoration Committee (SLORC), as the military dictatorship was known back then. But as bilateral relations grew frosty, New Delhi saw itself lose out to China. The generals forgave Beijing for its long-standing support to the Burmese Communist Party and other armed rebels and pushed for Chinese investments and political support. Indian policy makers also worried about the activities of insurgent groups in the North-East and their use of Burmese territory as a safe haven. Starting in the mid-1990s, therefore, a course correction was effected. New Delhi began engaging with SLORC (and its current avatar, the State Peace and Development Council), dropped its vocal support for Daw Suu Kyi and, in a sense, has never looked back since.

Whenever the Indian government has had second thoughts, or come under western pressure to re-evaluate its approach to the military regime, it has baulked at changing course for fear of giving a greater handle to the Chinese. Though China has made spectacular inroads, it remains wary of Indian influence there. Not surprisingly, the generals in Myanmar have become quite adept at playing Beijing off against New Delhi. Each of these rising powers is insecure enough about the other to pander to the endless demands of the Burmese junta for economic assistance and political legitimacy.

One way to break this cycle is for India and China to have a frank dialogue with each other about Myanmar and to see if a win-win situation can be brought about in which the military regime agrees to ‘normalise' the economic and political situation in the country. If the West's policy of sanctions and boycotts has failed to make a dent, India and China ought jointly to leverage their engagement with the regime to help bring about some improvement in the conditions of the Burmese people.

An India-China JV

This, in turn, begs the question of whether India and China have enough in common to think about a common approach. At first blush, their interests seem orthogonal. In strategic terms, China is interested in Myanmar as a cargo and energy transit route along a south-north axis running from Sittwe in the Bay of Bengal to Yunnan province. For India, however, the west-east transit axis is crucial since Myanmar is a missing link both for better connectivity with north-eastern states like Mizoram and with the wider Asean region. Unless Myanmar comes up to speed, the trans-Asian railroad and highway will remain incomplete.

China, which has not been an enthusiastic supporter of India's integration with ‘East Asia' might arguably have a stake in disrupting this west-east connectivity. But Beijing also knows the forces of political economy in a networked world cannot forever be held at bay by the lack of border infrastructure. Indeed, the benefits that will accrue to Myanmar as a result of its emergence as a transit route along multiple axes will generate positive externalities for China as well.

Similarly, India has no reason to fear the Chinese plans for a natural gas pipeline from Sittwe to Kunming; if anything, by making China less insecure about the vulnerability of its sea lines of communication, such infrastructure may actually lead to a scaling back of Beijing's plans for an expansion of its naval fleet.

India and China compete for Myanmar's offshore gas but there are other markets in the fray too like Thailand and there is no reason for energy to become a zero-sum game. India lost out in 2006 not so much because of Chinese competition but because Delhi's inability to work out a transit plan through Bangladesh meant it had no immediate use for the gas being produced. Today, given Myanmar's potential in both natural gas and hydroelectric power, there is enough to keep Indian companies like OVL and NHPC gainfully occupied in the long-term even as Chinese companies operate.

One more guided democracy

In a pre-emptive move against growing international and domestic pressure for change, the generals in Nay Pyi Taw have begun laying the groundwork for the transition to a ‘managed democracy'. In April, Prime Minister Thein Sein hung up his uniform and announced the formation of the Union for Solidarity and Development Party (USDP). The USDP, which has subsumed the activities of Myanmar's biggest government-organised NGO, the Union for Solidarity an Development Association, will be the army's designated political vehicle when national elections are held, presumably later in 2010.

Though the results of the election are a foregone conclusion, the National League for Democracy ought to reassess its decision to boycott the process. There is no way the NLD will be allowed to surprise the military's party the way it did in 1990 and Daw Suu Kyi cannot participate since the rules bar prisoners from being members of political parties. But a boycott will be effective only if the NLD can mobilise enough support on the streets and if the military fears the adverse impact this would have on its international standing. Neither of these conditions hold. The SPDC has already hit rock bottom in the global popularity stake and the opposition's chances of paralysing Yangon, Mandalay and the new capital of Nay Pyi Taw are low indeed. Given how well-entrenched the military is and given the South-East Asia region's preference for ‘order', a ‘guided democracy' is the best that can be hoped for under the present circumstances. But even this would be a huge improvement over the current stalemate and would open up political spaces that Daw Suu Kyi and the NLD could slowly utilise.

In 2000, when the SPDC last began experimenting with its version of political reconciliation, the Bush administration and the rest of the west took a dogmatic, all-or-nothing, stand. The result was that Daw Suu Kyi was sent back to jail. Khin Nyunt, the powerful intelligence chief who convinced his military colleagues that a limited relaxation at home would open doors abroad, ended up getting purged. To the extent to which India's word still counts, it should urge the NLD and others to participate in the upcoming election. And it should tell the senior general that if he is prepared to liberalise politically, New Delhi will do its bit to help end Myanmar's international isolation.

DIPLOMATIC NOTEBOOK: For Krishna, a year of hectic travel

2010-07-21T01:37:00.006+05:30

The External Affairs Minister has visited 27 countries in 12 months. With his frequent flyer miles has come greater confidence but Indian diplomacy is still plagued by mixed messages...

20 July 2010
The Hindu

DIPLOMATIC NOTEBOOK
In a year of hectic travel, Krishna has clocked 27 countries

Siddharth Varadarajan

Some ministers treat international travel as a “junket”, others regard it an unwelcome burden. But if there is one man whose job requires the accumulation of frequent flyer miles, it is S.M. Krishna, who has emerged as India's most mobile external affairs minister in recent years.

When he touched down in Islamabad last week, Mr. Krishna notched up his 27th country in 12 months, a punishing pace of travel that marks a dramatic change from the less frenetic — and somewhat sedate — schedules of some of his predecessors.

Mr. Krishna came to South Block in June 2009, when he replaced Pranab Mukherjee at the Ministry of External Affairs. Mr. Mukherjee's willingness to fly out was greater than that of his predecessor, Natwar Singh, but he was also overburdened with domestic responsibilities. That said, the present incumbent's record both in terms of miles flown — some of them in ‘cattle class' — and range of destinations is impressive by any standard. In the past year, he has been to Bhutan (twice), Italy, the Czech Republic, Japan, Egypt, Thailand, Singapore (twice), Australia, Brazil (twice), Belarus, Turkmenistan, the United States (thrice), Russia, Afghanistan, Trinidad, Myanmar, U.K., Kuwait, Nepal, China, Uzbekistan (twice), Kazakhstan, Iran, South Korea, Mauritius, Mozambique and Pakistan. This week, he visited Kabul again.

The past two months alone have seen him fly to southern Africa, East Asia, West Asia, North America and Central America. All told, Mr. Krishna has been to every permanent member of the U.N. Security Council (except France), as well as to countries and regions where EAMs seldom go calling. Some of these visits have been of the routine goodwill variety and some have been firefighting missions — a case in point being the sudden trip to Australia to register India's unhappiness at the spate of attacks on Indian students. But most visits have involved a substantial bilateral agenda.

Curiously, India's immediate region is somewhat underrepresented. Myanmar, Bhutan and Afghanistan have seen ministerial visits but not Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and the Maldives.

It may seem paradoxical that Mr. Krishna is travelling much more than his predecessors in an era when the role of the Prime Minister and his National Security Adviser as foreign policy drivers has become more pronounced. And yet, the fact is that an ever expanding calendar of multilateral events has begun to circumscribe the possibilities of bilateral diplomatic engagement at the highest level. Every year, for example, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has to attend the G-20 summit twice, the East Asia Summit, the India-EU summit and the U.N. General Assembly. Every other year there are the BRIC, IBSA, NAM, and CHOGM summits, not to speak of routinised annual bilateral events with ‘strategic partners' or thematic summits like those that were held recently on climate change and nuclear security. The pressure is such that the Prime Minister has stopped going to the UNGA every year and has no time for other meetings like those of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, CICA and G-15.

Under these circumstances, the task of holding the multilateral fort and crafting new bilateral agendas falls largely upon the shoulders of the EAM. And though a “rising” India has the ability to function as a magnet for inbound visitors, much also depends on the willingness of its foreign minister to spread his wings and take flight.

No need for minders

Diplomacy, of course, is not just about going the distance, it is also about the messages conveyed. And with Mr. Krishna's frequent flyers miles has come confidence, though, unfortunately, some officials still insist on prompting him, not always with the best of effects.

When he was first named to the job, some observers looked askance at the former Karnataka Chief Minister's lack of foreign policy experience. Though his early public interactions seemed overly scripted, Mr. Krishna's measured performance in Pakistan last week took his critics by surprise. If the visit did not yield a positive outcome, this was not for any failing on his part but because of factors beyond his control: Pakistan's attitude, the Manmohan Singh government's decision to limit the scope of dialogue, and the remarks on the ISI made before the delegation's arrival in Islamabad by Union Home Secretary Gopal Pillai.

Some opposition leaders have asked why Mr. Krishna did not contradict the Pakistani Foreign Minister when he made a reference to Mr. Pillai's remarks. Opinions can differ but Mr. Krishna made what he thought was a sensible judgment call under the circumstances: the press conference had already turned unpleasant and he decided not to prolong the encounter.

That the press conference took a nose dive towards the end was unfortunate. Just before that, Mr. Krishna had fielded a difficult and even provocatively phrased question on Kashmir. This is where his experience as a seasoned politician came in handy. He was mindful of his location and audience and spoke with great tact and precision, giving the official Indian position on Kashmir and human rights violations. Mr. Qureshi also gave an answer that reflected Pakistan's position but did not cross any diplomatic red lines. Unfortunately, an MEA official, who perhaps felt Mr. Krishna had not given the right answer, handed a note to him on infiltration from Pakistan which the minister then proceeded to read out as soon as Mr. Qureshi was done with his answer. This interruption in the rhythm of the press conference — comebacks in such events are rare and media handlers strongly discourage them because of the risk of an adversarial exchange — prompted the Pakistani minister to respond in a testy manner. From there on, matters rapidly went south.

Pillai's solo flight

The issue has acquired extreme sensitivity so no one will agree to speak about this on record but this much can be stated with absolute certainty: Home Secretary G.K. Pillai was on a solo flight when he told The Indian Express on the eve of Mr. Krishna's visit to Islamabad that the ISI was involved in the November 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai from “the beginning till the end.”

Though people in Pakistan saw some great design at work, there can be no question of the MEA having been consulted or even informed beforehand of the bombshell Mr. Pillai was about to drop. This is because the MEA, despite repeatedly asking the Home Ministry for details, is still completely in the dark about what Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorist David Coleman Headley told Indian investigators in Chicago last month! Worse, the Prime Minister's Office, which is in the Headley loop, was also caught unaware by Mr. Pillai's statement.

Since the public airing of this accusation came barely three weeks after Union Home Minister P. Chidambaram met his Pakistani counterpart, it is likely Mr. Pillai's boss was also taken by surprise. Just as he was last year, when the Home Secretary declared that Hyderabad would be the capital of Telangana. Government officials have since publicly circled their wagons around Mr. Pillai but privately there is considerable criticism being voiced within. One source compared the Home Secretary's statement to the solo flight of Matthias Rust, the amateur German aviator who piloted a Cessna all the way to the Soviet Union in 1987. “Rust landed his plane in the Red Square. Mr. Pillai took his flight all the way to the Minar-e-Pakistan,” the source told The Hindu.

Timeline on Siachen, Kashmir talks was the deal-breaker at Islamabad

2010-07-18T12:38:00.002+05:30

Pakistan Foreign Minister Qureshi overruled his officials over draft of common talking points ...

18 July 2010
The Hindu

Timeline on Siachen, Kashmir talks was the deal-breaker at Islamabad

Siddharth Varadarajan

India and Pakistan had agreed to a rough schedule of meetings between different sets of officials as envisaged by the composite dialogue process but the inability of the Indian negotiators to firmly commit to a resumption of Defence Secretary-level talks on Siachen led Pakistan's Foreign Minister to walk away from the deal at hand.

Nevertheless, according to sources on the Indian side, the fact that the two countries agreed dialogue was the only way forward meant the Foreign Ministers' meeting was still “positive”. Another plus was the Pakistani side's acknowledgment — for the first time since 2008 — that the gains made in back channel talks on Kashmir during the Musharraf years “were important and useful,” the sources told The Hindu on Saturday.

The sources said External Affairs Minister S.M. Krishna travelled to Islamabad with a proposal that would have seen the two sides beginning talks on trade, tourism and other issues almost immediately while leaving formal parleys on Jammu and Kashmir, ‘Peace and Security', and Siachen for a later date with the foreign secretaries to be tasked with working out the modalities for that.

“We wanted to move ahead with CBMs first because they are easier,” the sources said. “We made it clear we were willing to discuss the other three issues too but said we need a certain catalysing process. They are more complex so it is better to start with what is more easily achievable.”

“Since June, we had been talking of starting meetings between various secretaries — commerce, water resources, culture — and the Pakistanis were very much on board with this idea,” the sources said.

Sir Creek

On Sir Creek, India said it was ready to discuss any Pakistani response to its last proposal and was willing to hold a meeting of the Surveyor-General from the Indian side and the Additional Secretary of the Defence Ministry from the Pakistani side.

The sources said officials from both sides worked past lunch on July 15 to produce a draft of common talking points for the joint ministerial press conference that was scheduled for later that day. Though not a joint statement, the draft spelt out a mutually acceptable framework for future meetings and included language that worked around obvious differences on a timeline for the resumption of talks on Siachen and Kashmir.

But when the Pakistani side sent the draft to Shah Mahmood Qureshi for his approval, the Minister shot it down, the Indian sources said. Pakistani officials were not available for comment.

Mr. Qureshi had an all-or-nothing attitude, the sources said. “They wanted us to accept a calendar of meetings which would have amounted to a resumption of the composite dialogue in all but name … It seems there was a lot of emphasis on optics from their side. They want to put Humpty Dumpty together again. But the fact is [he] fell off the wall. It is not as if we can immediately go back to the situation pre-Mumbai … We need progress on terrorism.”

The sources said India was proposing that action on the terror front would “catalyse” the process of talking on what Pakistan considered ‘core issues'. “But we didn't put specific goalposts other than to say action against terrorism should be expeditious and should lead to the unravelling of the Mumbai conspiracy.”

Fresh efforts were then made to rework the language of the ‘talking points'. This time, the Pakistanis wanted specific timelines for the resumption of discussion on Kashmir, peace and security, and Siachen. Since it was a given that the two Foreign Secretaries — who normally handle Kashmir and ‘peace and security' in the composite dialogue — would be meeting again, it was relatively easy to blur over the fact that India had not yet agreed formally to resume discussions on the subject. But Siachen proved a harder nut to crack. Apart from the absence of a timeline, the Indian desire to refer to future interlocutors on the subject as “relevant officials” rather than the two Defence Secretaries was another obstacle. As the evening wore on, the Indian side, which acknowledges being in touch with New Delhi on several points, categorically told the Pakistanis that their mandate did not include agreeing to a firm commitment to resume dialogue on Siachen.

Though the heights of Siachen proved insurmountable, the sources say other factors may also have been at play in ensuring the talks ended inconclusively. The Pakistani side did tell the Indians how Home Secretary Gopal Pillai's statements on the involvement of the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate in the Mumbai attack had evoked anger in Islamabad.

Asked about Mr. Qureshi's claim of “instructions” being sent from Delhi, the sources said this was natural and that he too left the room with his officials at one point. “Clearly he was answering to a higher authority. And though he is a Maqdoom, that authority was not God!,” they added.

The sources said it was unfortunate that the “petulance” of Mr. Qureshi's remarks on Thursday and Friday had deflected attention away from what the two sides had discussed and highlighted only the “atmospherics”. But they said India intended to keep its own rhetoric down so as to allow temperatures to subside.

The Indian side acknowledges that as matters stand, there are no official meetings planned or scheduled between now and December, when Mr. Qureshi indicated he might come to Delhi for a return visit. But the sources hoped the Pakistani side would realise the need to continue engagement. A meeting of the bilateral judicial commission to review the question of prisoner repatriation is due and India hopes Pakistan will convene it soon.

The sources said that although Mr. Krishna and Mr. Qureshi will be in Kabul next week for an international conference, no meeting between them was being envisaged as of now.

The perils of ‘half-way house’ diplomacy

2010-07-17T18:34:00.006+05:30

Having decided to engage Pakistan on issues beyond terror, it is counterproductive for India to artificially limit the subjects it is willing to discuss.

17 July 2010
The Hindu

The perils of ‘half-way house’ diplomacy

Siddharth Varadarajan

Future diplomatic historians will, no doubt, tell a more complex story but the broad outlines of External Affairs Minister S.M. Krishna's less-than-successful visit to Islamabad seem clear enough.

Having hosted Home Minister P. Chidambaram three weeks back and heard firsthand from him exactly what India wanted on the terrorism front, the Pakistani side's expectation from the foreign minister-level meeting was that there would be discussion and, presumably, some agreement on a wider set of issues.

In the run-up to the meeting, Indian officials, too, had let it be known that they were looking at a range of subjects like trade and people-to-people contact as a way of building trust. When he arrived in Islamabad, Mr. Krishna said India was ready to discuss all outstanding issues.

Pakistan knew the formal resumption of the composite dialogue — or some updated variant of it — was still some distance away. It was also prepared to discuss the deepening of confidence building measures as a stepping stone. But it was wary of publicly accepting a formula or roadmap for engagement that frontloads not just terrorism but every other issue that India considers important while leaving issues that Islamabad considers ‘core' to an unlit backburner for future ‘warming up.'

The irony is that these issues — Jammu and Kashmir, peace and security, Siachen and Sir Creek — are subjects India and Pakistan have wasted several years of formal dialogue over without either side budging one bit.

For example, Indian soldiers remain firmly perched upon the Siachen glacier's commanding heights despite officials from the defence ministries of India and Pakistan having held several rounds of talks. Many more rounds can safely be held without our jawans being required to come down by even one metre — if that is what the government wants. Given the long-standing deadlock over proposals for verification of a mutual withdrawal, the Pakistani side knows nothing would be gained by yet another meeting of defence secretaries.

But the civilian government which is struggling to assert its authority against multiple power centres within and even outside the ‘establishment' needed something to show for its diplomatic exertions.

The Indian delegation, however, did not come to Islamabad with a mandate flexible enough to accommodate the need for these kind of harmless optics. Worse, their limited mandate was undermined from within by Union Home Secretary G.K. Pillai's accusation that the Pakistan state — with which Mr. Krishna was going to sit down and have talks — had planned the November 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai.

Pakistani foreign minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi was undiplomatic in mentioning Mr. Pillai's unhelpful remarks in the same breath as Lashkar-e-Taiba chief Hafiz Saeed's inflammatory speeches against India.

But people on the Indian side need to ask what the home secretary hoped to achieve by saying the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate of the Pakistan army had been involved in 26/11 “from the beginning till the end.” Indian investigators had questioned Lashkar operative David Coleman Headley well before Mr. Chidambaram and Mr. Pillai held talks with their Pakistani counterparts in Islamabad last month. One can only presume this question of ISI involvement “from the beginning till the end” was raised by them with Rehman Malik.

In Islamabad, Mr. Chidambaram told reporters that India wanted Pakistan to vigorously investigate and follow up the leads available in the Mumbai terror attacks. He said he was leaving Pakistan with the conviction that “[Mr. Malik and I] have exchanged views, understood the situation and agreed that we should address the situation with the seriousness it deserves.”

Three weeks have elapsed since the Home Minister made that statement. Is that time enough to form a judgment on Pakistan's “seriousness”, let alone decide to gut the possibility of its cooperation by making a public accusation of state complicity?

At stake is not the veracity of Headley's information — though it is worth asking why the statements of a terrorist who helped attack Mumbai in order to get India and Pakistan to go to war should be taken at face value — but the utility of levelling a serious charge in public. Did Mr. Pillai or his advisers do a cost-benefit analysis beforehand and conclude that blaming the ISI in this manner on the eve of the foreign minister's talks would make Pakistan more likely to address India's concerns about terrorism?

If Mr. Pillai's comments on the ISI betray a failure of the government to think strategically, the decision to postpone any front-channel discussion on issues like Siachen and Kashmir till there is greater “trust” is also deeply flawed.

In politics, the default option is often the easiest one to take. Having suspended the composite dialogue in the wake of the November 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, it would have been quite simple for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to keep the dialogue process under suspension indefinitely. There would be no need for him to explain anything to anybody. But just as Atal Bihari Vajpayee had the courage to invite Pervez Musharraf, the architect of Kargil, to Agra in 2001, or to travel to Islamabad in January 2004 despite cross-border terrorism not ending, Dr. Singh was brave enough to say that not talking to Pakistan indefinitely was a bad option.

The Prime Minister showed enormous political courage at Sharm el-Sheikh last year and againt at Thimphu in making a case for engagement. He knew full well that his decision would run against the grain of both hawkish political sentiment and the risk-averse attitudes of the security establishment. But in a concession to these quarters, his advisers came up with the constraining formula of 'incremental dialogue'.

In the wake of the acrimony that Mr. Krishna's visit has produced, the government's critics in the opposition and the ‘retirati' are likely to say Dr. Singh was wrong to try engagement. That would be an incorrect conclusion. Thursday's fruitless talks and the rather churlish comments of Mr. Qureshi since then are not the product of dialogue and engagement but of the half-way house that Indian officials have parked themselves in.

Dr. Singh was bold enough to steer India away from the rigid position of no dialogue but he should have been bolder still in recognising that indulging Pakistan's desire for official talks on Kashmir, Siachen and other ‘core issues' would cost India nothing and would actually be a cheap way of moving the CBMs process forward.

India's current rigidity on this question is counter-productive. No doubt Dr. Singh is wary of how a more open attitude towards the resumption of dialogue would play. All democracies — and many non-democracies — have to worry about public opinion. But in this particular case, the burden of good optics weighs much more heavily on the civilian government in Pakistan than it does on the UPA government in India.

If India looked at the problem strategically, it would recognise the importance of not allowing jihadi and extremist forces in Pakistan to depict the civilian government as an entity which meekly surrenders to Indian positions.

Anti-Indianism is the glue that the terrorists and their backers in Pakistan use to bond with a public which is otherwise under daily attack by them. The creation of a dialogue structure which allows the Pakistani side to hold its head high domestically against extremists of all hues is what India should be striving for, especially at a time when the attack on the Data Ganj Bakhsh shrine in Lahore has outraged the Pakistani people.

Mr. Qureshi may have been abrasive and tactless in many of things he said but his remarks on Balochistan and Kashmir and even infiltration (‘deal firmly with them and we will back you') led hawkish journalists to attack him as pro-Indian. India is dealing with the complexity of a sharply divided Pakistani establishment and society. It should resist the temptation of matching Mr. Qureshi's desperate grandstanding and instead think deeply about how the process of engagement which has started can be broadened and deepened.

Substantive dialogue is still some distance away

2010-07-14T12:34:00.000+05:30

Instability on the AfPak front — and not the lack of trust — has emerged as the binding constraint on India's ability to move bilateral talks on Kashmir forward...

14 July 2010
The Hindu

Substantive dialogue is still some distance away

Siddharth Varadarajan

As India and Pakistan move the latest phase of their engagement to the foreign minister level, a curious shift in national attitudes and priorities on the bilateral front is now evident.

Earlier, it was New Delhi that expressed its inability to resume a substantial dialogue on the ‘core' dispute of Kashmir unless the terrorism issue was addressed. On its part, Islamabad treated with suspicion any suggestion that talks could be held on secondary questions first while Kashmir was postponed to a later date. So it was that a feeble attempt India made last September to talk about only humanitarian issues at the Joint Secretary level pending the eventual resumption of “substantive dialogue” never got off the ground. Nine months later, the Indian side has come around to the view that the “complex negotiations” on Kashmir which took place in the back channel with Pakistan from 2004 to 2007 were leading to a favourable outcome and ought to be revived, even if total satisfaction on the terrorism front is not forthcoming. But it is the Pakistani side which today is in no position to pick up the threads of the Kashmir dialogue.

The official Indian perception of the reason why this is so is that the Pakistani military never fully backed the Musharraf formula of leaving the territorial status quo in Jammu and Kashmir intact while evolving ways of making the Line of Control irrelevant for the people of the state. In an essay for the Harvard International Review in 2009 written before he was named National Security Adviser, Shivshankar Menon said India had two worries about the back channel — whether future governments in Pakistan would respect any agreement which emerged and whether the “internally omnipotent Pakistan Army” was on board. “The first question was never put to the test and remains unanswered”, he said. “All too soon the second was answered in the negative”.

In an all the Track-II meetings I have taken part in with Pakistani analysts, politicians and ex-officials in recent months, it has become abundantly clear that virtually no section of the political, bureaucratic or military establishment is willing to buy in to the back channel. For the politicians, the problem with the emerging Kashmir formula lies with Musharraf's paternity, which they are reluctant to embrace; as for the bureaucrats, they resent the role played by an outsider like Tariq Aziz. Each of these aversions can be remedied quite easily but unless the reasons for the military's opposition are understood, any attempt to revive the back channel is bound to flounder.

As long as the Pakistani military feels it has better options in hand, it will not support the kind of back-channel dialogue which took place earlier. One can argue that the traditional Pakistani approach of supporting separatism, militancy and terrorism is hardly likely to succeed but the metric for success the army brass is looking at is not a favourable outcome in Kashmir. What is at stake are options that help to entrench the military as the most powerful and indispensable institution in the country in the years ahead, when the demands for genuine democracy and federalism become more insistent.

For the moment, the Pakistani military's attitude towards the back channel, Kashmir and India is strictly a function of the cards it believes it holds in the wider ‘AfPak' game. This is a game full of peril and promise, where the potential for strategic gains for it are evenly matched by the prospect of catastrophe. For decades, the establishment nurtured extremist groups which acted as force multipliers against democratic forces within as well as against India and Afghanistan. If Musharraf was willing to look at the possibility of reaching an agreement with India in Kashmir, this was mainly because internal political circumstances and the Bush administration's blunders in Iraq meant the military establishment was not under pressure to surrender positions on the domestic and Afghan fronts. Both of these equations began to change from 2007 onward. The lawyers' movement, the return of civilian rule and the American surge in Afghanistan have rendered the establishment's assets and interests vulnerable all round. Under the new circumstances, a settlement in Kashmir would jeopardise the ability of the army to project itself as the custodian of Pakistan against a perpetually hostile India.

Even if the establishment had no direct hand in the November 2008 terrorist attack on Mumbai, the ensuing tension was helpful because it gave the Pakistani army an alibi to resist American pressure to do more on the Afghan front. Though the Manmohan Singh government almost immediately indicated that it had no intention of taking military action, the absence of dialogue for more than a year allowed Islamabad to keep up the illusion that the primary threat confronting the country was India and not terrorism. Today, with Pakistan under pressure to open the North Waziristan battle front, New Delhi's willingness to resume sustained high-level dialogue is aimed as much at making bilateral gains and building trust as at creating a conducive regional atmosphere for military operations against the Taliban and other extremist groups.

The attempted bombing of Times Square in New York by a terrorist with links to Pakistan-based groups and the recent suicide attack on the shrine of Data Ganj Bakhsh in Lahore also mean the domestic and international alignment of stars is the most propitious for such an undertaking. But India has a vital role to play in not giving the Pakistani military an excuse to sidestep this vital agenda. During his visit to Islamabad, External Affairs Minister S.M. Krishna should try to review the full-range of confidence-building measures India and Pakistan have agreed to in recent years and discuss ways of taking them forward. Back channel talks will have to wait but that does not mean India should resist the resumption of ‘front channel' talks on Kashmir if the requirement of domestic optics makes them necessary for Pakistan.

NSG discusses China-Pakistan deal, defers new ENR rules

2010-06-26T14:47:00.002+05:30

Amidst internal divisions, series of demarches by India, consensus on the draft new rules proves elusive ...

26 June 2010
The Hindu

NSG discusses China-Pakistan deal, defers new ENR rules

Siddharth Varadarajan

New Delhi: Much to India's relief, the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) on Friday failed to adopt new guidelines that would have led to the denial of enrichment and reprocessing (ENR) technology to countries like itself that have not signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

In a statement issued at the end of its two-day plenary meeting in Christchurch, New Zealand, the NSG only said, its members “agreed to continue considering ways to further strengthen the guidelines dealing with the transfer of ENR technologies.”

The NSG statement also euphemistically says, “The Group took note of the briefings on developments concerning non-NSG States [and] agreed on the value of ongoing consultation and transparency.”

Diplomatic sources told TheHindu this was a reference to China's desire to sell two new reactors to Pakistan at Chashma in addition to the two that were contracted and approved by the NSG in 2004 as part of the country's pre-existing commitments.

Though no details about the discussions on the Chinese proposal were available, the sources said, the NSG statement's reference to the need for more consultation and transparency suggested a lack of consensus on the issue and perhaps even a face-off.

China has suggested the two new reactors were “grandfathered” by its 1991 agreement with Pakistan and should thus be exempted from the NSG ban on sales to non-NPT countries. Other NSG members have responded by noting that the Chinese side made no mention of a third and fourth reactor when they talked about the Chashma-1 and 2 when they joined the group.

On the ENR issue, consensus on the draft new rules proved elusive, thanks to strenuous lobbying by India and resistance from within the 46-nation cartel by a handful of countries such as Turkey. In the run-up to the Christchurch meeting, when it became clear the U.S. was trying to get the new restrictions approved, India worked on Russia, France and also Germany to ensure a deferment.

Official sources said New Delhi sent a clear signal to its friends and partners that the NSG's September 2008 exemption must remain unaffected by any changes adopted since that decision was the product of mutual undertakings by both the NSG and India.

Apart from the NPT rule for the ENR sales, the U.S. has been pushing for mandatory adherence to the Additional Protocol as well as tighter restrictions on the sharing of sensitive technologies with countries that have not so far mastered enrichment or reprocessing.

These conditions were initially opposed by Argentina, Brazil, Canada and South Africa. Canada and Argentina have since reportedly fallen into line but Turkey, which is only now embarking on a civil nuclear programme on the basis of cooperation with Russia and South Korea, does not want to be disadvantaged by tougher rules.

China, Pakistan and the NSG

2010-06-24T13:15:00.004+05:30

Rather than objecting to what it can't prevent, India should back a nuclear deal for Pakistan structured around a package of non-proliferation commitments...

24 June 2010
The Hindu

China, Pakistan and the NSG

Siddharth Varadarajan

How would Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary have reacted to the news that a 13-year-old boy recently scaled the same peak which they were the first to conquer in 1953? Would they feel a tinge of irritation at how ‘easy' the summit has now become? Perhaps. But I am sure they would not feel their own accomplishment had in any way been diminished.

Having successfully broken the back of international sanctions on its civilian nuclear programme in September 2008, India needs to ask itself how it should look upon Pakistan's desire to follow in its footsteps and access civil nuclear technology for its energy needs. Should it stand in the way and try and block Islamabad from entering base camp as some panicky members of the Indian strategic community advocate? Or should it adopt a more mature attitude and work with its international partners to ensure the orderly incorporation of Pakistan into the global non-proliferation regime?

The question is relevant because China is likely to inform the Nuclear Suppliers Group of its decision to sell two pressurised water reactors (PWRs) for the Chashma-3 and 4 power stations in Pakistan. Virtually, every member of the 46-nation cartel believes this sale would be a violation of guidelines Beijing committed itself to follow when it joined the NSG in May 2004. China, of course, disagrees. India has so far wisely confined itself to asking the Chinese side for information about the proposed transfer. On June 22, Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao fielded questions from reporters on the subject with a straight bat: “We are monitoring the debate and the developments in this regard as they relate to this subject of supply of nuclear reactors by China to Pakistan,” she said, carefully choosing her words. She did not criticise the proposed transfer or object to it, nor could she have. Three months ago, when asked about the possibility of nuclear cooperation between the U.S. and Pakistan, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had made it clear India has no locus standi. “Who am I to interfere with what goes on between the United States and Pakistan?” he said. “That's a matter for these two countries to consider.” The same logic should surely apply to what goes on in the civil nuclear field between Beijing and Islamabad.

NSG guidelines say members should sell nuclear equipment and material only to countries that are party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty or who accept full-scope safeguards — that is, who agree to place all their nuclear facilities under international inspection. There are only three countries which do not satisfy this criterion: India, Pakistan and Israel. Two years ago, the NSG voted unanimously to exempt India from this restriction. In exchange, India took on a number of commitments. These included separating its civilian and military nuclear facilities and placing the former under International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards. India also undertook to abide by its moratorium on nuclear testing, support international efforts to negotiate a verifiable Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty (FMCT), implement rigorous export control norms and not share enrichment and reprocessing technology with others. Prior to the NSG waiver, India finalised a safeguards agreement with the IAEA providing for indefinite IAEA supervision of its civilian nuclear sector.

Today, the NSG's restrictions no longer apply to India but they do still to Israel and Pakistan. When China became a member of the NSG six years ago, it made a “declaration of existing projects” in order to be able to fulfil supply obligations towards Pakistan that had been made prior to that. China and Pakistan signed agreements for civil nuclear cooperation in 1986 and 1991. The latter agreement has not been made public but two MoUs were signed in its wake for the construction of PWRs for the Chashma-1 and Chashma-2 power stations. China told the NSG that since these projects were ongoing, it would continue to supply fuel and equipment for them. Since it made no mention of Chashma-3 and 4 at the time, their inclusion is clearly an afterthought. If China persists with its export plan, this would arguably be the first time it openly flouts international rules it had voluntarily agreed to abide by. Chinese help for the Pakistani nuclear weapons programme is well known but virtually all of its proliferation activities occurred before it formally acceded to the NPT in 1992. Similarly, China has stuck to its NSG commitments since joining the cartel in 2004. Deviating from them now would raise questions about its willingness to play the role of a “responsible stakeholder” in the international system.

India is not a member of the NSG and will, therefore, not be in the room when the matter is discussed in Christ Church, New Zealand, this week. But it can respond to the new situation that is unfolding in one of three ways. First, it can go into overdrive to lobby NSG members to take on China and make sure there is no dilution of the group's rules prohibiting nuclear commerce with Islamabad. Second, it can remain quiet and do nothing. Third, it can make a virtue out of necessity and suggest the NSG start considering the need to bring Pakistan into the non-proliferation tent.

Of these, the first option is the worst from the strategic and diplomatic perspective. Trying to block something which India is in no position to prevent will exacerbate tensions with Pakistan and China and expose the weak hand the country has on this question. The only circumstance that would justify a blocking strategy is if the proposed Chinese transfer were to alter the strategic balance in the subcontinent. In fact, the supply of two safeguarded civilian power reactors will not make any difference, unlike say a transfer of unsafeguarded nuclear equipment or material or of new delivery systems for nuclear missiles. The binding constraints on the size of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal are the enrichment capacity of Kahuta, the small size (40 MW) of its heavy water reactor at Khushab and the amount of natural uranium it has access to. None of these constraints will be affected by the two new PWRs.

Given the conservatism of Indian diplomacy, the second option of silence is the one most likely to be followed. But this option is also inferior. No country in the world, least of all Pakistan or China, will believe India has no views or concerns on the transfer. Its silence will, thus, likely be seen as an admission of impotence rather than as an expression of statesmanship and wisdom. This option is also inferior because it is not in India's interest that the international non-proliferation system be tinkered with on an ad-hoc basis. The Indian exemption at the NSG may have been pushed by the U.S. but it required the active concurrence of dozens of countries. What emerged from those bruising sessions in Vienna in August and September 2008 was a careful balance of rights and obligations which benefited both the international system and India. China today lacks Washington's hegemonic ability to change the global rules. If it breaks ranks with the NSG and acts unilaterally, the after-effects could be quite destabilising.

India should, therefore, consider the third option of encouraging the international community to discuss the contours of an agreement that would lead to the orderly induction of Pakistan into the global nuclear regime. Given its population and energy needs, Pakistan needs help in developing a diverse energy portfolio. In line with global trends, it is logical that its leaders should look favourably upon nuclear power.

Thanks to its past record in proliferating weapons-related technologies, however, Pakistan will have to do much more to establish its credentials as a responsible partner in the field of nuclear commerce. Any exemption at the NSG would likely involve stricter parameters and wider commitments than were seen in the India case. And if the Indian exemption took three years and two months to fructify, it is reasonable to expect Pakistan's exemption to take twice as long. The benefits of immediate engagement are, nevertheless, overwhelming. Islamabad's opposition to the FMCT — partly triggered by irrational fears about the impact of the Indo-U.S. nuclear agreement on India's ability to produce fissile material — means the Conference on Disarmament has been unable to begin its work on the treaty. If Pakistan knows there is light at the end of the NSG tunnel, its attitude at the CD may change.